Sankey: Realignment impacts the CFP and the approach to the expanded playoff should be revisited

Pretty sure the F*ck Sankey remark refers to his not so subtle jab at the conference.

Dude took a direct shot at the B1G as if he wouldn't have done the exact same thing. He actually kind of did do the same thing by taking OU and UT but it just happened they border most of SEC territory. Also is anyone buying his "sadness" over the Pac-12? C'mon, man...

I wouldn't consider Purdue as the second place finisher despite winning the West.  They had 3 conferences losses, while OSU only had 1.

Yes! Why not continue to allow the 6 automatic bids?...nobody said they had to come from these 5 conferences + 1 from another group of conferences. The 6-best conference champs will get them.

We know that the top 8-10 teams will be in the 12-team CFP, that should be sufficient. We don't need the 12-team playoff to consist of the 12 best teams.

We all love the college basketball tournament that has 68 teams but are not the 68 best teams. We pretty confidently get about the top 50 teams and we throw a bone to the rest. Football can likewise guarantee a spot for the top 8-10 teams and throw a bone to a few other conference champs that worked hard all season to earn what they achieved. Let's give them a CFP road game as a reward.

Was it really unsustainable, or even truly failing though? It's one thing to go after the money - it's another thing to wring every dollar you can out of an enterprise, and then squeeze out other successful enterprises so you can wring a bit more - which is what the Big Ten did with the LA schools. The Pac12 had been together, in various names and forms but with those teams, for 108 years. How is that unsustainable or unsuccessful? Their schools made enough money on football to have 3 bona fide contenders/championship programs over the last 35 years - Washington, Oregon and USC - and were about 2 minutes in the 1996 Rose Bowl away from adding Arizona State to that list too. They also used that money to have some of the best women's sports programs in the world - which I certainly care about, especially when the USA is going for gold better than any other country is.

What we're seeing is a failure of leadership - because there is no central leadership. This used to be good - it allowed the Wazzus and Texas Techs of this world to exist and occasionally thrive. But now it's squeezing them out as if they're competitors, rather than partners/franchises. And so in my mind, the solution is to have some dang leadership. And the CFP seems a perfect venue for this.

My overriding (and half-baked) thought is that governance of college sports will continue to devolve until a way is found to put the sports themselves back in charge of writing the rules (of how the game is played, how long the season should be, what a fair & representative playoff should look like, transfer rules, recruiting rules, etc).  In effect a re-invention of the NCAA, but with a firewall between financial interests and the interests of the sports themselves.  I'm thinking of governing councils of each sport composed of some balanced collection of former coaches and former players (to ensure that rule changes are in keeping with the spirit of the sport), unaffiliated educators (to ensure that student athletes remain students), and perhaps non-athlete student representatives (for in-person fan perspective).  There could be ex-officio participation by representatives of universities and broadcasters, who could offer advice on implications of rule changes, but wouldn't have voting power because of their financial interests.

Right now it's powerful protected entities (market entry as a university or broadcast network is nearly insurmountable), motivated by individual financial (not sport-related) interests, making rules in which the athletes and fans have virtually no input.  It reminds me of Game of Thrones.

I will always push back against those that defend universities chasing sports/network revenue (or saying that the schools "must" do such things).  Why?  The answer is simple: the schools do not truly "need" the money from the revenue sports, which is borne out in several observations:  First, most universities in this country (not merely the FBS schools) generate no net revenue from their athletic departments - they are instead subsidized by the greater university (which puts undue strain on the *purpose* of those universities - which is academic education.)  One could argue that demonstrates a need for sporting revenue, but that leads to the second observation: those schools that *do* have substantial net revenue for the athletic departments do not use much (if any) of that revenue to promote the mission of the university - which, again, is the academics.  There may be small uses that *nominally* are promoted as being "for academic purposes" - namely the subsidization of scholarships for student-athletes - but this is still serving the interests of the athletic departments rather the schools' academic purpose at large (and we won't even broach the subject of schools giving financial preference to students for aspects that have nothing to do with their academic abilities).  Almost all of the "revenue" from the university sports is dumped right back into the athletic departments - which is why we have coaches (public employees) making 7-8 figures per year while schools are trimming back on lecturers, staff & faculty due to budget cuts; why we have schools spending hundreds of millions on pro-sport caliber stadiums/arenas/training facilities (often only used a handful of times per semester, if that) while educational labs and lecture halls have outdated and failing equipment; why we have some student-athletes being given every advantage at school (from tutoring to stipends to hotel-level accommodations and other perks) while most students struggle to cover their bills while in school and graduate years in debt.

But as long as people are entertained and companies can still advertise during it, this is "ok".