Jim Harbaugh shares his detailed College Football Playoff expansion plan
This might actually be a good starting point for expanding the College Football Playoff.
The first College Football Playoff rankings of the 2019 season will be released Tuesday night, and at that point, fans will really begin to argue over which teams deserve to be among the top four.
While these rankings are, obviously, specific to each particular season, they also reignite debates about the playoff system itself. Should it expand to more than four teams? Is the criteria consistent? Is there a clear bias? And on and on.
Some college coaches in the past have offered their in-depth thoughts on the playoff and how they might change it, like Clemson’s Dabo Swinney and Washington State’s Mike Leach.
Well, Jim Harbaugh has his own idea too, and it’s actually pretty reasonable without drastically increasing the number of games in a season.
In a larger story from ESPN’s Heather Dinich that polled nearly all Power Five football coaches about the playoff setup, Harbaugh broke down his own plan to improve the playoff organization and selection. It includes ditching conference championship games, makes room for a Group of Five representative and incorporates the BCS system.
As the Michigan football coach explained to ESPN, his plan would expand the playoff to 11 teams. Teams would still have a 12-game regular season, and conference champions would be determined based on conference record and tiebreakers, dropping the title games.
“To play each other, to have tiebreakers, within those 12 games, you should be able to determine who your conference champion is,” Harbaugh told ESPN. “If you don’t have the conference championship games, then you can expand your playoff to at least eight.”
So five conference champions plus the top-ranked non-Power Five team round out the first six playoff teams. After being seeded according to the BCS system, the top-5 seeds get a bye in the first round.
Then Harbaugh suggested continuing to use the BCS system to rank the remaining five at-large teams, which would include top Power Five teams that aren’t conference champs, possibly opening the door for a talented two-loss team that would likely otherwise be ignored. Harbaugh’s plan would also have spots for independents, like Notre Dame, and impressive Group of Five teams, like UCF was in back-to-back undefeated regular seasons.
Replacing conference championship games, the playoff would start the first weekend in December with Nos. 6 through 11 playing.
The following weekend, the top-5 teams would join the winners of the first round in a bracket to play the second weekend in December, with the winners advancing to a semifinal game in late December — like the current system has now — and eventually a championship game in early January.
To have won it all last year under the Harbaugh Plan, Clemson would have played a total of 15 games, ending with the national championship on Jan. 7.
“You’d still have the same bowl structure that you have now, and teams that lost on Dec. 1, it’s like they would’ve been in a championship game and then they play in a bowl game,” he said. “Nobody would play 16 games.”
It’s not a terrible plan, considering Clemson still would have 15 total games under this system.
However, some teams seemingly worthy of a bid would still get left out, and their fans would still be outraged. And let’s not forget how much college football fans loved (read: hated) the BCS system.
Plus, if a lower-seeded team manages to advance to the national championship game, then we are actually talking about increasing the number of games unpaid college athletes are playing.
But as ESPN’s story — which we highly recommend reading — notes, a near majority of the 62 Power Five coaches surveyed want the playoff to expand. So perhaps Harbaugh’s idea is a reasonable step in the right direction.