I just don’t see that as the big picture negative that some do. It’s still hope for a team like Duke, for example. There will be upsets, just like in the regular season. I just don’t get the angst. Would I rather it be smaller? Sure. But it’s not that big of a deal whether it’s 16 or 24.

I think their rankings got inflated in case they won the conference, which they did.

Check the poll standings just before the bowls from recent history. The bottom of the top 25 is full of 3- and 4-loss teams any given year. None of them would ever be confused with a legitimate playoff team save the expansion of the field.

But I don’t think you will see that happening.

9-3 ASU or Iowa on their way to getting straight up murdered, and nobody's watching anyway. Now you just have more unwatchable games but under some new "playoffs!!!" branding.

a Cinderella team winning it all or even getting to the final four is very low. But by the same token it highlights it as a big money grab.

12 is good. 24 is ridiculous. Instead of bowl games no one cares about that are at least competitive, now there will be things like Ohio State playing the MAC champion. Oh, the joy of a buy-in game in the playoffs!!

There were plenty of talking heads saying we got screwed last December. That's about as good as we can hope for.

other than the part at the end. The notion that ND is ever going to get a fair shake from Joe Sweatsock who takes his marching orders directly from the big conference/network cabal on TV & SM sounds awfully dubious. Whatever dry powder Pete is holding back is practically worthless IMO. We will never win over hearts + minds in that forum. Our only recourse is winning. And money.

When you watch Iowa and Arizona State fight for the right to travel for Athens you're going to think "I COULD be watching the Dr Pepper Big XII Championship right now!"

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How the powers-that-be in college sports continue to ruin a good thing. They've basically destroyed a number of historical rivalries thru conference land-grabbing and scheduling shenanigans, and blew up the fun and unique experience of New Year's Day. And then they went and built the 12-team playoff model, which was actually pretty cool, only to almost immediately rip it apart before it even got a decent toehold.

Perhaps an expanded playoff will bring back the awesomeness of New Year's Day college football, but I expect we're going to see a whole bunch of meh matchups and blowouts.

And one might think that expanding to 24 would finally be the end, but I presume that so many ADs and Presidents are going to complain that they can't run their departments without playoff money that expansion will only continue.

in a 24-team field. Just last year there would have been probably seven 3+ loss teams and also 4-loss Iowa.

A couple of things here.

Pete is not Jack. That is a good thing. As someone who works in sports and worked within college sports for a minute, I think Pete is the proper architype for ND at this moment. Jack was great navigating the battleship at 30,000 feet in an older era of collegiate athletics where hanging on to principles/elements of amateurism allowed ND overly distinct and unique in how they approach all situations.

Those days are gone and college athletics have been professionalized. With that, schools make decisions based on the control they have granted to broadcast partners via rights deals (see the ongoing saga in the ACC with Clemson/FSU). I feel much more comfortable having someone like Pete (and even Petiti) in the saddle, who has navigated those commercial waters in prior roles, than someone like Jack. Sample size of one. But just some additional context.

Also, you need to pick your battles. The sitting in a circle and singing Kumbaya that has happened with Phillips and Pete at the ACC meetings signals something else to me. Pete recognizes that ND was the story for a while last year. They can't continue to be the story. They need to fall in line, at least publically, on certain issues so when they need to cause a shit storm again, it actually gets a fair shot at a fair take from the public. If they continue to go against the grain, it helps no one in the long run as they just look like a challenging part-time member, to the ACC or someone like the B1G or SEC who could be a future home.

I don’t think many/any 3 loss teams will be getting in after Alabama demonstrated that folly last year, especially with conference games gone.

People are REALLY gonna want byes, which means even a 2nd loss will be a heavy price.

I get that it devalues the regular season, but so does cupcake scheduling and body bag games.
And the entire non playoff bowl system is already dead.

Ultimately I think 16 on-campus playoff games is kind of an unalloyed good. Eliminating conference championship games is overwhelmingly positive for ND, given that they were ONLY used to leapfrog us, but ignored when teams ahead of us lost.

We've already had a preview.

isn't lighting my fire.

Will star players just sit out entire games during the regular season?

I think there would be a number of unintended negative consequences to casting such a wide net, and the regular season overall will be considerably less interesting when the barrier to entry is so pathetically low.

I don't feel strongly about it, but there are going to be some absolute clunker playoff games. The first round is already largely lopsided. This will only make it worse.

Playoff fatigue is a real issue for me as well. The tournament is like 4.5 weeks long at this point. How bad will it be when the number of teams is doubled?

Unless devaluing the regular season is a Boomer ethos.

That's my issue with it. College football had a fatalism feel to it with any loss potentially looming as a season ending consequence. The entire season was a playoff.

The only trick is that the playoffs are closing in on being half as long as the regular season:

Week 1: 8 games to go from 24 to 16 teams
Week 2: 8 games to go from 16 to 8 teams
Week 3: 4 games to go from 8 to 4 teams
Week 4: 2 games to go from 4 to 1 teams
Week 5: championship game

Depending on the team, 12-game schedules already have a bunch of scrimmages baked into them. So a team with a schedule like Indiana's can play 2-3 meaningful regular season games, then 4-5 meaningful playoff games.

I honestly don't think this encourages teams to put together difficult regular season schedules. It lowers the floor to allow for a slip-up or two, but the best strategy is still playing as many cupcakes as possible to lock in a playoff spot and as high a seed as possible.

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At night, the ice weasels come.

The regular season will still matter greatly, and even moreso at the margins, where irrelevance was really coming to sap the life out of the diversity of the sport.

Also, getting rid of the rump conference championship games is an unalloyed good that outweighs any superior elements of a different system.

I don't love the bye weeks, but so it goes. It's better than the current setup.

I like it. More college football is good, not bad. And I think the prospect that a Wake Forest or an Iowa can make the playoffs is good for those schools and ultimately good for the sport. This seems unquestionably good for ND; it helps with scheduling and gives us more opportunities to make the playoffs.
Not that anyone here is guilty of this but there is a bit of a “get off my lawn” quality to the opposition.
Sure, it’s all about the money. But, boy, we are well beyond that.

1) The Indiana approach will probably work for non-blue bloods, and would be a valid path to the playoffs for any P4 team. Put together the easiest schedule possible to basically guarantee a 10+ win season. This will absolutely lock in a playoff spot for any P2 team, and be pretty close to a lock for the ACC and B12 teams.

2) Build up a tougher schedule and hope that the committee allows a strong win to overwrite a loss. This has the advantage of putting your team on TV as well as preparing for play against tough teams, but I'm not sure relying on the committee to reward you is all that wise of a strategy.

The optimal strategy is probably to follow the first approach and push the rest of your conference to follow the second. Good matchups will increase TV revenue over the long run, and all of that money is shared across the conference. Plus, a team would get the reputation of playing in a tough conference without having to play extra tough games. '25 Mississippi kind of went down this route.

Along those lines, I wonder if ND would have been better off last season beating Texas A&M but losing to Boise State or someone else.

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At night, the ice weasels come.

But that's lower-hanging stuff than the number of playoff teams or how those things are divvied up. Very important to us but not impactful for the sport itself.

The question for me is how much juice NBC actually has here. In reality, even the whales like Sankey and Petitti are probably just puppets for ESPN and Fox now. Has NBC made enough of a commitment to CFB to have actual input? And if so, do Pete's connections there give ND a voice? Dunno.

I'm still wrapping my head around that one.

If this doesn't cause a massive change in scheduling philosophies for certain programs, that means teams that schedule three tomato cans and then go 5-4 in conference will have a shot at the title. Games in September and October are going to have a lot less gravity than they ever have.

I don't really care what the anonymous coaches and other athletic department mouth breathers are whining about to Brett McMurphy -- it's actually kind of fun -- but the ACC presidents and ADs surely see the value in that nice fat payday when we come to town. I believe the buyout fee goes down in a couple of years (and the whole contract expires in what, 2035), so one of the obvious cards PB can play is leave early vs. give us more of Miami and FSU and less of the dregs. And give us flexibility on dates. Etc.

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but since the most recent consolidation of power conferences, the landscape is not at all the same as it was for the brunt of his predecessor's tenure. Even if ND didn't support a move to 24 playoff teams (which is terrible IMO), could we do anything to stop that from happening?

ND still holds some cards to play, but our ability to steer the direction of this aircraft carrier seems to be...limited.

If anything, hopefully a major concession from the ACC.

I am getting more and more on the "Pete's an idiot" bandwagon of late. We need a wartime consigliere, not a Tony Petitti clone with less clout.

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inevitability, or at least alter the superconference incentive structure when the next great re-organization happens. Or maybe there will just be a 60 team superconference with a 24 team playoff anyway, who knows.

conference political bullshit.

Conference political bullshit makes 16 the ideal number for ND (IMO).

The only redeeming quality of 24 would be if it kills the conference title games. But that would be a pretty darn redeeming quality for me as an ND fan.

It just doesn't matter

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The 2007 ND-UCLA game was a once in a lifetime experience, I hope

16 teams would clearly have provided the same benefits as 24 (save the extra $$$ grab), but conferences are unwilling to remove their championship games unless it's at 24.

Overall, probably a net positive for ND, so I'll take it. The conference championship games need to go.

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The other proposed changes to the sport are mostly positive: as you mentioned, eliminating the conference title games, all teams starting the regular season at Week Zero to be able to end it the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and reducing the crazy-long layoffs to be able to finish the playoff in early January rather than the end of the month.

This is some comical bullshit.

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#Team128

since a tougher schedule including games against ND will likely be viewed favorably for inclusion with it being more difficult for playoff candidates to distinguish themselves amongst a gaggle of mediocre-ass 3+ loss teams.

However, I think bumping to 16 would achieve a similar goal without making the CFP a total fucking clown show like 24 would.

I think it could redound in our favor in terms of filling our regular season schedule. Restoration of the USC series becomes a no excuses no-brainer (from Riley and Cohen’s POV).

reportedly kill the conference title games, so it will eliminate the "extra data point" bullshit.

The SEC is the last holdout with sanity, pushing for 16 instead. But they'll cave at some point - as much as it sucks, 24 appears inevitable.