ESPN’s Rece Davis on CFP expansion: ’24 is preposterous and 16 is bordering on it’

Credit: The Next Round

The debate over how many teams the College Football Playoff should expand to, if it should expand at all, is currently raging as all signs point to a 24-team bracket coming soon.

While the SEC has been championing a 16-team expansion, nearly every other power broker in the sport seems to support the 24-team solution, which would double the current field.

While ESPN, which owns the media rights to the CFP, hasn’t made its case either way, there have been reports that the company aligned with the SEC (with which it also has a media rights deal) on 16 teams.

Rece Davis, who anchors ESPN’s College GameDay, also agrees with the notion that 24 teams is simply too much, though he’s not exactly on board with 16 teams either.

“I think 24 is preposterous and 16 is bordering on it,” Davis said on The Next Round podcast. “I wish they would do— leave it at 12 and do an extra round of games on campus. This right now, the struggle is largely due to business and control, and it’s not necessarily for the good of the game. And the coaches who are getting behind this, I believe, and reasonable minds can differ, but the coaches who are behind this think it’s going to save their job. It’s not.”

Davis added that while making the CFP might be good enough for the coach of a mid-tier program to justify his job, it’s not going to do much for coaches at traditional powerhouses like Ohio State, Notre Dame, Alabama, and Michigan, where the expectation is already national title-or-bust. And soon, that’s how it will be for all schools.

“Making the playoff sooner or later will be like the NFL, right? NFL coaches, NBA coaches, all the time get fired for making the playoffs, not advancing as far as the leadership thinks they should,” he added. “That’s going to happen here, too. So if that, if that is your motivation in that it will be easier to get in the playoffs, you’ll have fewer controversies, all of those types of things that you hear, I think you’re fooling yourself.

“You’re going to continue to have those problems and coaches are going to get hired and fired just as they always have. It will depend on the expectation and the standards of the program that they’re guiding, and it won’t be enough just to get into the first round and get clobbered. Maybe for a year or two.

“I mean, look at Indiana. You think Indiana— I mean, I’m not suggesting they would fire Curt [Cignetti], but I mean, do you think they’re going to be happy if they get into the playoff this year and get walloped in the first round? No, no, because they’ve elevated expectations. And that’s what’s going to happen across the sport.”

Davis agrees with the popular sentiment that expanding the CDP will dilute the value of the regular season, which has long been college football’s calling card. He also cited an example similar to the one ESPN’s Mike Greenberg used to make his argument.

“The thing that I do remain concerned about is that as much as I love college basketball, is that we turn it into the college basketball regular season,” Davis said. “Where you have to be a devoted fan of the sport as a whole or a devoted fan of one team to really lock in on a regular season game. And the regular season in college football still remains the best in all of sports. You want it to matter.

“You don’t want to ever get to a point where… Michigan and Ohio State are resting people because they’re going to play next week. You just don’t want to get there. And hopefully, wiser heads will prevail and keep this playoff at a manageable number and keep the calendar in a manageable space of time.”

CFP expansion is about as hot-button an issue as you’re going to see in college sports, and it seems as though everyone is coming out of the woodwork with their strong opinion on it. Perhaps some of those opinions are colored based on who they work or who they’re aligned with, but reactins like Davis’s also feel pretty authentic, given the impact this is going to have on the sport he covers for a living.

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