The College Football Playoff expanded to 12 teams this past season, and the games were overall a success. While the first round games were mostly lopsided, we got a great quarterfinal between Texas and Arizona State and one of the best playoff games ever between Penn State and Notre Dame in the semifinals.
The CFP format could obviously be tweaked a bit to enhance the product and make some of those first-round matchups a little bit more compelling, but that was always going to be part of the expansion. However, the SEC and the Big Ten want to take it a step further and lock down auto-byes — going as far as four for each conference — to get the maximum amount of teams in the field from each conference.
ESPN’s Michael Wilbon, like most other people, is vehemently against the idea. He ripped the two conferences and the idea of auto-bids into the College Football Playoff on Wednesday’s Pardon The Interruption.
PTI host and Northwestern trustee Michael Wilbon on the SEC and Big 10 pushing for 8 auto bids in the CFP:
“It leads toward the ruination of what I appreciate about college football. … I don’t like exclusion when it comes to sport. I want inclusion.” pic.twitter.com/OwxLsFNWpN
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) February 19, 2025
“It leads toward the ruination of what I appreciate about college football,” Wilbon said of the proposed CFP changes. “Having followed it all my life and covered it half my life, I hate what this is doing. And yes, I’m a trustee at a university in one of those conferences that is at the big kids table, the golden child table, to be in the Big Ten or SEC and I’m grateful for that,” he admitted. “But now, I’m sure I’m going to make people who deal with me in the Big Ten cringe. I don’t like exclusion when it comes to sports. I want inclusion. When you cut out fanbases, when you cut out regions of the country. … You exclude rivalries. You chop down, when you do this, a big part of what college football really is, and I find it loathsome.”
Wilbon is absolutely right with his assessment. If those policies were in place this season, a team like SMU would have been left out of the CFP after a great season in favor of an Alabama team that didn’t deserve to be in the field based on the regular season that it had.
Giving the top two conferences auto-bids, especially when those berths would make up two-thirds of the CFP field, is absolutely wrong and not fair to anyone else even if those two leagues are better than the rest of them. Those teams should still have to earn their way into the playoff field just like everybody else.
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