I'm a bigger fan of college sports than their professional alternatives and college football season is like a holy time of year for my dad and me. When the NCAA announced the 4-team playoff structure a few years ago, I was pretty excited. There had been far too many occasions where deserving and elite teams, including some undefeated teams, weren't able to compete for a national championship because there were other teams with better recent history, schedules that were set years in advance that turned out tougher than the others', and even because certain teams would draw more money in a championship game than others. The two team system wasn't fair.

Most years, a four team playoff is sufficient. There are usually only three or four teams really worthy of being considered for a national championship; so a four team playoff usually works. However, every once in a while, there are five or six teams that have undefeated or one-loss records and those one loss teams usually lost to one of the other top teams, sometimes in nail biters determined by fluke plays like a blocked punt return for a touchdown, a blocked field goal that should have been a chip shot, or a seemingly improbably 50+ yard field goal. In these years, an expanded playoff would be nice.

Even though I'm a Notre Dame fan, I do think every conference champion deserves a shot at playing for a national championship. Likewise, if you aren't your conference champion; I don't think you should be playing for a national champion (how can you be a national champion when you aren't even the champion of your own conference?). There are a lot of things I would like to see changed, but one change I was initially thrilled to hear about was the potential of having first round games held on campus!

I really think it stinks in any sport when two teams have to travel halfway across the country to a neutral site and their most die-hard, middle class fans can't afford both the expense of traveling to the game and the tickets. Especially when you have a situation where schools without enormous followings like Cincinnati and Wisconsin play in Texas or California and we have to watch a game with a mostly empty stadium, or a stadium filled with people who really don't care and paid less for a ticket than local fans paid for the scrimmage spring game at the start of the year.

As we learned during the 2020 season, games without fans aren't as much fun to watch and the fake crowd noise is atrocious.

This was a short-lived attempt at adding video to my commentaries. I may revisit it once KTracy.com is more squared away and I have regular content on my main YouTube channel.

Needless to say, when I learned last night that Bowl Officials want these games at Bowl sites I was instantly annoyed. It's one thing to use a neutral site if you have two teams with uncommonly small stadiums and poor facilities for the press, but virtually every game will feature at least one team with state of the art media facilities in their home stadium. The reason bowl officials want these games is simply money.

I think it would be more fun to let teams that lose in the first round play each other in bowl games. If, in a 10 team playoff, teams ranked #5, #7, #9 and #10 lose, it might actually be really helpful for the final rankings to play one more game and teams with great seasons get a chance at a consolation prize with a bowl game win, not to mention all the goodies you get for playing in the game.

I really hope the NCAA keeps their plan to host games on campus, but then finds a way to get some of these teams in one real bowl game after they're eliminated from the playoff.

More games = more money and more fun!