Oram: CFP’s flawed system failed Oregon, needs to be fixed

Published 6:03 pm Thursday, January 2, 2025

Nobody said it was going to be perfect.

The first year of this new-fangled 12-team College Football Playoff was bound to have some growing pains. But two rounds into the revamped postseason, it’s impossible to ignore just how poorly conceived and sloppily assembled this whole enterprise was.

That was as true before Oregon’s humiliating defeat in the Rose Bowl as it is the morning after.

This is not sour grapes.

The CFP gave us a system that is not simply in need of some minor tweaking. The thing has failed.

A champion will be crowned on Jan. 20, and it will be a deserving champion. But the process by which that team was determined will not fairly honor the college football season that led to that point.

Six of the first seven games of the playoff have been one-sided duds, decided by double-digit margins. All four teams that earned first-round byes lost in the quarterfinals, with second-seeded Georgia being the final domino to fall against Notre Dame in Thursday’s Sugar Bowl.

This year, the biggest advantage any team in the playoff field receives is the opportunity to host a game on campus. But it is nonsensical that that advantage goes to the teams seeded fifth through eighth, and not the teams with the best regular seasons.

Oregon’s reward was a 25-day layoff between games against one of the nation’s top teams that played a tune-up game at home a week earlier.

Nobody would have designed it that way.

“We didn’t take advantage of our opportunity,” Dan Lanning said on Wednesday night. “I’m not going to make excuses for our opportunity.”

That’s what he needed to say. Nobody wants to hear from the losing coach that it wasn’t a fair fight, even if it wasn’t.

And let’s be clear: The Ducks were beaten by Ohio State, not by the CFP committee or the bracket.

But in this case two things are simultaneously true.

One, that Oregon was thoroughly outclassed in the Rose Bowl and, two, that the Ducks were not adequately rewarded for posting the nation’s only undefeated regular season and winning their conference championship.

Oregon’s regular season success already feels emptier because of what happened in Pasadena. But winning in the regular season has been completely devalued by a system that actually better rewards teams that suffer a loss or two than one that manages to run the table.

This year it’s an Oregon problem. But next year it could be an Alabama or Texas or Michigan problem.

And the CFP simply can’t face these issues again.

So what to do?

The obvious answer is to eliminate automatic byes for the four-highest ranked conference champions. The CFP should simply follow its own rankings. Half of those four this year backed into that first-round bye. Boise State and Arizona State only leapt into the top four because the ACC could not produce a deserving champion and because the Big Ten and SEC represent a disproportionate number of the country’s best teams.

Conference champions should earn a home game, but not an automatic bye.

And if home sites are going to be part of the playoff — and they are perhaps already the best part — then the top teams need that advantage, too. Moving to home sites through at least the quarterfinals would allow for that.

Yes, that disrupts what remains of the bowl system. And none of the Rose, Fiesta, Orange or Sugar Bowls are going to be eager to give up their spots in the College Football Playoff.

But this is bigger than those institutions continuing to rake in cash.

The playoff system was overhauled only to give us a system that already needs to be overhauled.

I’m a proponent of the expanded playoff. It’s better for the sport when more teams have something meaningful to play for at the end of the season.

But those in charge of the system set itself up for failure by not anticipating obvious and predictable pitfalls.

Like Oregon did against Ohio State, the CFP just ends up looking ridiculous.