March Madness-style football playoff? Not so fast

Just imagine ...

March Madness, the football version. That would be awesome, right? Now everybody gets a chance. No more whining because the fifth- and sixth-best teams in the country, or at least those perceived as such, got left out. Here’s your shot at inclusion Oklahoma State. Oops, sorry. You’re still the first team left out.

A tournament of champions, if you will. Fifteen championship games comprising 16 teams – all 10 FBS conference champions and the next six highest-ranked at-large teams. Or the next five plus Notre Dame when the Irish finish .500 or better.

This way, a top-10 finish guarantees a team a shot at the national championship. So, don’t worry, Southern Cal. Go ahead and get your brains beat in by Alabama in the season opener. It’s just one loss. Go ahead and lose three of your first four games. Just pad that resume with eight wins over mostly mediocre teams, avoid having to even play for your conference championship – let alone win it – and you are in.

So are you, Appalachian State. Blitzing through the Sun Belt Conference the way you did with only one loss, to Troy, is good enough to earn you a matchup against Alabama.

Look, March Madness is great for basketball, where schools with smaller budgets can recruit five or six really good players, coach them up well, play as a team and slay Goliath once in a while.

But it would never work in football, at least not practically.

Expanding the college football playoff to eight or 16 teams sounds great in theory because it would give us more games and would give the little guys a chance.

But would it really be better than the system we have in place right now?

Think about it. Again, just imagine …

It is the first Saturday in November, the weekend of Alabama-LSU, Auburn-Texas A&M, Georgia-South Carolina – games that could go a long way toward determining the SEC division winners. Alabama, Ohio State, Michigan, Washington and Clemson are all sitting there with one loss.

The playoff race is getting tense. Well, it should be. But with a 16-team playoff format, all of those one-loss teams are virtually assured of a spot in the playoffs.

The Iron Bowl? It no longer matters much in the national picture. It’s just another rivalry game. Ditto for Ohio State-Michigan? Winner gets to trash-talk, loser plays for the national championship.

Alabama’s humiliation of Southern Cal in the season opener is little more than an exhibition game. Because under this new format, the Trojans get new life even with three losses.

So during the regular season home stretch in November, we’re no longer talking about which four teams will make it and which teams will be left out. We’re talking about which four teams will get the top seeds. “Bracketology,” only with Kirk Herbstreit and Desmond Howrd instead of Jay Bilas and Clark Kellogg.

Here’s what the brackets would have looked like last season. Top four seeds and their opponents: (1) Alabama vs. (16) App State, (2) Clemson vs. (15) Temple, (3) Ohio State vs. (14) Western Kentucky and (4) Washington vs. (13) San Diego State.

The rest of the field: (5) Penn State vs. (12) Western Michigan, (6) Michigan vs. (11) Florida State, (7) Oklahoma vs. (10) Colorado and (8) Wisconsin vs. (9) Southern Cal.

Another option would be to just take the top 16 teams, which would have added Oklahoma State, Louisville, Auburn and West Virginia.

Either way, assuming there were no major upsets, the bracket would have produced some interesting second-round games. One would be an Ohio State-Michigan rematch. Another would have been Alabama-Southern Cal. Now Bama’s 52-6 win over the Trojans is even more meaningless.

Would we really want to see Deshaun Watson risk blowing out his knee against Temple in the first round just so we could find a way to include more teams?

The idea that expanding the field would eliminate the arguments from teams left out also falls short. Consider Syracuse coach Jim Boeheim’s reaction to the Orange getting snubbed by the selection committee.

“Last year we had the same losses and the committee chose to go with the team that had the wins. It’s difficult to understand the change from one year to the next.”

Syracuse finished in a three-way tie for seventh in the ACC. SEVENTH!

You know Oklahoma State coach Mike Gundy would have gone on a rant if the Cowboys had been the first team left out of the tournament. Never mind the fact that Oklahoma State had one win over a ranked opponent (West Virginia).

Even with just an eight-team field, the top team left out would have been Southern Cal. You know the Trojans would have been livid.

The College Football Playoff is fine just the way it is. Maybe not perfect, but as close to perfect as we’ll ever get.

This story was originally published March 25, 2017 at 3:44 PM with the headline "March Madness-style football playoff? Not so fast."