The Wrap: Conference championships, playoff should be pushed back
Ohio State is 4-0 this season.
The Buckeyes come in at No. 4 in the College Football Playoff rankings, which would land them in the playoff were the season to end right now. They’re deserving of it, too. Junior quarterback Justin Fields is playing like a Heisman finalist (again), and the entire team around him is loaded (again).
Ohio State was set to play the University of Illinois last weekend, Saturday at 11 a.m. CT in Champaign, Ill. The game was canceled because of a coronavirus outbreak among Ohio State’s football team, reaching head coach Ryan Day, among others.
Did the cancellation take away a suspenseful football game? Probably not. As much as I root for the alma mater of my brother, dad and basically the entirety of my dad’s side of the family, the Fighting Illini were going to get absolutely trampled. The cancellation saved the Ackerman household from having to witness that inevitable reality. That’s not really up for debate.
This is a Daily Trojan column. Why am I talking about Ohio State and Illinois?
Knowing that its teams will play varying numbers of games this season due to coronavirus cancellations, the Big Ten has instituted parameters for teams to qualify for the conference championship game: Teams must play at least six games to be eligible, unless the average number of games per Big Ten team is below six. In that case, teams can qualify by playing no fewer than two games below the average (rounded to the nearest whole number). So, if the actual average is below six and the rounded average is six, teams can qualify by playing four games.
Ohio State has two more weeks remaining in its regular season. If one of those games is canceled — and coronavirus cancellations often last multiple games — Ohio State won’t play six games. For the average number of games per Big Ten team to fall below six, 12 of the last 14 games would have to be canceled. So six games will probably be the threshold for OSU.
Nathan, cut to the chase, damn it.
As I wrote before, Ohio State is clearly one of the four best teams in the country. If it can’t qualify for the Big Ten Championship, though, that means it’ll play at most five games on the season, presenting the CFP with a lose-lose:
Option 1: Put OSU in the playoff after playing just four or five games and not even appearing in its conference championship, let alone winning it.
Option 2: Leave the Buckeyes, one of the four best teams in the country, out.
Neither option is appealing.
Thesis: Push back the Pac-12 and Big Ten conference championships and the College Football Playoff.
I made it a point to lead with Ohio State because I’m aware the timing of this column appears rather self-serving: USC gets a game canceled by the coronavirus for the first time this season — probably a bigger blow to the Trojans’ playoff hopes than Oregon losing to Oregon State — and I immediately write about overhauling the whole schedule.
But this has very little to do with USC. This has everything to do with the fact that at this point, all across the country, competitive integrity is a lost cause.
Why was USC-Colorado even canceled in the first place? The answer is competitive integrity. If an entire position group gets depleted to the point where it lacks sufficient scholarship players, a game under those circumstances lacks competitive integrity. At some point, you can’t just keep saying, “Oh, it’s 2020, it’s a weird season, you just have to roll with it.” There are games to be won and lost, just as any other year.
So how, when we get to the end of the season, are we supposed to assemble a four-team playoff field when the teams you’re comparing played various numbers of games ranging from around five to around 11? How do you pick between a 5-0 Ohio State, a 6-0 conference champion USC and a 9-2 Florida? The CFP rankings are always guesswork, but this year, they’re guesswork mixed with extrapolation and imagination.
Counter argument: Pac-12 Commissioner Larry Scott and Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren did this to themselves by dragging their feet and creating no flexibility in their schedules.
Fair, though I think somewhat overblown — I don’t mind the precaution when cases in member communities were climbing. But yes, they could’ve gotten the ball rolling faster, and yes, they could have created flexibility.
But should their conference’s coaches and players have to pay for it? Should they have to see their seasons come to an abrupt close after months of stopping and starting, all the while risking (and sometimes experiencing) illness? I believe not. This is a chance for Scott and Warren to make up for any initial mishandling.
Another counter argument: This punishes the SEC and ACC, who will have already completed almost a full schedule and then have to wait for the other conferences to catch up.
If the Pac-12 and Big Ten push their respective conference championships, say, two weeks — from Dec. 18-19 to Jan. 1 — those teams get an extra two games, giving the CFP another two weeks to evaluate which teams should be playing for the national championship. Then, should any Big Ten or (dare I say it) Pac-12 team make the playoff, they’ll roll right into the semifinal 10 days later and, should they win, championship the following week.
Is this really an issue for the SEC and ACC? Instead of the CFP semifinal beginning Jan. 1 and ending Jan. 11, it starts Jan. 11 and ends Jan. 18, with games still scheduled for Mondays to avoid conflict with the NFL Playoffs. Alabama, Clemson and Notre Dame — or whoever makes it from their conferences — get an extra 10 days of rest for the semifinal, in theory an advantage.
And the rest of the New Year’s Six bowls, where the losers of those conference championships might end up? Simple: Push those back a week.
Participating teams are left with a season of around 8-11 games, with a few weeks off here and there in the middle. Do they get shorter rest than usual for bowl season? Slightly. But is the season, on the whole, no more physically demanding (from a non-virus perspective) week-to-week than a typical one? Also yes.
It’s not just the playoff hopefuls that will benefit. It’s everybody from Oregon State to UCLA to Northwestern as well. More games means more experience for budding programs to build on, more time to sneak into a respectable bowl game, more showcases for NFL fringes to prove themselves.
As always, there’s one massive elephant in the room. It’s the elephant that every one of these decisions, including that of whether to play this season at all, comes down to: money. But the financial incentive is obvious: more games, more money. Done.
Of course, it’s much easier for the Pac-12 and Big Ten to just hold the L and pack their bags for 2021. But frankly, that’s a disservice to the people who generate the big bucks. Players and coaches are asked to stick around, keep competing, keep risking contraction of disease, strive for a Sisyphean task that a short schedule won’t allow for and inevitably reach a disappointing result, unclear as to the purpose for even being there in the first place.
Nathan Ackerman is a junior writing about USC football. He is also an associate managing editor of the Daily Trojan. His column, “The Wrap,” runs every Monday during football season.