TCU’s Gary Patterson isn’t one of them. Instead, the TCU head coach told ESPN.com that the playoff should expand to six teams.
In this scenario, Patterson said the six teams would consist of a team from each Power 5 conference, plus an at-large team from “any conference.” The top two teams would receive a bye.
“To me, it makes no sense to have four playoff spots and then have five conferences,” Patterson told ESPN.com. “This way gives everybody a chance to have their champion or their best team be a part of the playoff, and a sixth team that could be from any conference, and then you get down to that final four pretty quickly and still not change the way we do things. I don’t want the bowl games to go away. I think that would be a loss to college football if we ever allowed that to happen. But doing it this way might make everybody happier.”
Patterson said he’d pitch the six-team playoff at the Big 12 meetings in the spring –but there’s a catch to his idea. In order for the current playoff to stay the same, the ACC, Big Ten, Pac-12 and SEC would have to eliminate their conference title games in order to free up the first weekend in December for the first two playoff games (No. 3 vs. No. 6 and No. 4 vs. No. 5). That would allow the semifinals to remain on New Year’s Day and for the Championship Game to keep its slot 10 days later.
“I think you would probably make more money on the playoff games in December than you would with the conference championship games,” Patterson said. “Other than the SEC, there were a lot of empty seats that I saw at those conference championship games. The teams playing on New Year’s would have basically the same amount of time to get ready, and you wouldn’t take away from everybody’s recruiting or interfere with final exams.”
Of course, Patterson’s TCU squad was spurned from the 2014 when it finished sixth in the rankings and the Big 12 was shut out of the Playoff as a whole with Baylor finishing fifth. If Patterson’s idea were to come to fruition, each Power 5 conference would have a representative.
“To me, when we went to this whole committee thing, it was to find the four best teams and not wait and see how they did in their championship games,” Patterson said. “As a general rule, you already know who the best teams are by who they beat and strength of schedule. There’s no perfect way. But with this, you would never have it happen again that a conference would not have a representative in the playoff.”
Baylor beat TCU in their head-to-head matchup last season, so Baylor would have been the Big 12’s CFP representative (assuming a head-to-head tiebreaker was in place) had Patterson’s format been in effect.
Patterson says he would have accepted that outcome.
“Had we set the rule that the head-to-head winner went, I would have been happy with that because that’s what we decided,” Patterson said.
Despite the chatter, representatives from the College Football Playoff have given no indication that expansion could come any time soon. In fact, Executive Director Bill Hancock told Al.com this week that there has been “no talk of talk of expanding.”
“I think we need to give this a chance. It’s such a remarkable new innovation for the game,” Hancock said.
The College Football Playoff’s current contract for four teams spans 12 years (with 11 to go) and the CFP has given every indication that it plans to honor that contract.
It appears we may be in for 11 more years of expansion talk.
For more TCU news, visit PurpleMenace.com.
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Sam Cooper is a contributor for the Yahoo Sports blogs. Have a tip? Email him or follow him on Twitter!
From Dr. Saturday - NCAAF - Yahoo Sports - TCU coach Gary Patterson calls for six-team playoff
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