Joel Klatt answers CFP and expanded playoff questions from the mailbag | Joel Klatt Show
OK I’m going to get to a couple of questions here really quickly as we close out the program. These are questions from Hilton Honors members. And so I’m going to try to answer these the best that I possibly can. OK so Katie, she writes in and says, how do you think the committee would handle a 12 and Alabama versus a 12 and texas? Well, we’re going to find out. But I will just tell you, that head to head has to matter because guess what doesn’t happen, generally speaking, in college football. Generally speaking, teams that are
in the top five don’t lose at home. In fact, this year, top five teams are 31 and 1 in their home stadium. The one loss was Alabama when they lost to Texas. So I don’t really care if it happened in September or in November. That game has to matter and it has to mean something. So I do think that the committee, if it came down to it and they had to compare 12 and Alabama and 12 and Texas, they would look favorably on Texas. Now, in that scenario, Bama would be an SEC champ and probably
go as well. So the scenarios might play out where they would both get into the playoff. But boy, head to head has to
and you probably are since you’re listening to this show, you’ll know that the transfer portal in the last couple of days has been wild. Lots of players from all over, big names, small names, small schools, big schools. Doesn’t matter. All these kids are looking for other opportunities at different places. You’ve got quarterbacks like Cam Ward from Washington State. He’s going to command quite a bit of attention in the transfer portal you’ve got now the added 0 aspect of what’s going on and what it’s going to cost for a team to bring in a player like
Cam Ward. It’s not out of the question that a player, a premium quarterback in the transfer portal in particular, a guy who’s got a track record and experience under his belt that he could command between 1 and 1/2 and $2 million for his next season of college football. Sounds outlandish, yes, but it really isn’t. When you talk about the value that a quarterback could bring to a program and what that could mean for their season moving forward. Is it good for college football, the transfer portal? Probably do there need to be guardrails? Yes, absolutely. I
want to go to the next question because it ties in. Jen writes in, as NIL name, image and likeness becomes more a part of the game in recruiting. Do you see any changes in how the process is managed or governed in the future? Yes, it is going to be changed. And it will be managed to some degree. What’s going to end up happening. And what we have right now in college football is that the leaders in college football, a lot of the commissioners there in Washington, dc, almost weekly lobbying our Congress for help in terms
of protecting and putting guardrails on intercollegiate athletics, but namely football. And part of that means that we need to find an opportunity to protect the student athletes better. Now, you might be thinking like, well, how does that relate if they’re going to get a million and a half or $2 million, what does it mean to also protect them? Well, if we can collectively bargain with the players, then what we can do is we can protect them from shady agents, because what’s happening right now is that this is so vast in terms of the volume of
players in college athletics. The volume of NIL deals is that players are entering into contracts and entering into NIL deals that are not good for them long term. They’re giving away their future earnings in perpetuity in some cases, to agents that are not vetted out because there is not an association in which we collectively bargain with. So will there be guardrails in the future? Yes will it look a lot different? Yes is it going to be better? Yes I do believe that it will be better. Last one. Let’s go to Christine. Christine chimes in and
she says, will the expanded playoff format change how top teams approach the regular season? How will they schedule non-conference opponents? And should conferences still have championship games? These are great questions, Christine. So first of all, the expanded playoff format. We will have to wait and see how it changes people’s approach to the regular season. I think this year is a big water mark in terms of how the non-conference is going to be weighted by schedule makers moving forward. And it’s because of that first answer I gave you the Texas Alabama issue. Even if it’s Texas
against Oregon in a debate or Texas against Florida State in a debate, if we don’t honor the teams that go out and actively schedule harder football games in the non-conference, then they’re going to stop scheduling harder football games in the non-conference. If Texas doesn’t get the benefit of the doubt or the ACE up their sleeve or the Trump card, if you will, for scheduling and beating Alabama, then what’s the motivation for scheduling those games in the future? And if we want to see those games as college football fans, then we better hope that the playoff
committee, whether it’s this year or in future years, will reward the teams that not only schedule those games but go on and win those games. I believe that we need to actually take over non-conference scheduling from athletic directors so that we can make sure we have all of these games. It would be pretty simple in my view. We take some of these power conferences, we pit some of the better teams against one another on an annual rolling basis. So just for a quick example, let’s just say next year the SEC and the Big Ten are
scheduling partners. Well, then you would take the SEC champion and the Big Ten champion and you would play them in September and you’d flip a coin and you’d say, well, all right, Michigan, you’re going to Georgia. Let’s just say Georgia and Michigan win their conference championship games and you would have those type of matchups and you’d make them like the NFL does, where you would be basing it based on where they finished the previous season. And then the last question you just had was, should the conferences still have championship games? That is going to be
a fabulous question. We’re going to try to incentivize conference champions with byes in the future, maybe even home games in 2026, in the second round. But there is talk among conferences that why would we want to play our top two teams in a conference championship game when we could play our third and fourth best teams and try to play one of them in to the college football playoff versus knocking somebody out of the college football playoff. So that remains to be seen. I think a lot of changes are coming to college football in the future.
Some will have to do with the players and the individuals and others will have to do with the structure and the postseason and how we crown champions.
