College Football Needs to Decide: Bowls or Playoffs?

College football has reached the ultimate fork in the road.

Since I started watching college football as a kid in the late 1980’s, the notion of a playoff has lingered over the sport. The problem, of course, was the bowl system. You couldn’t have both.

As we stand here in 2022, those who run college football foolishly think both is possible, as evident by their braindead 12-team playoff proposal. There’s also an 8-team playoff proposal apparently floating around between conference commissioners.

Either option will fail spectacularly, because it’s not a true playoff and destroys the bowl system.

The solution is clear. College football has a choice to make. Either they keep the current four-team playoff within the bowl system (and hopefully moving the semifinals to New Year’s Day) or expand to a true16-team playoff that includes every conference champion.

That’s it. That’s the decision college football faces. Unfortunately, no one in charge of college football has the guts or forethought to force this decision to be made.

I know there are many who want the playoff expanded for a variety of reasons. To be clear, I am not against expansion if it gets us to a full playoff. But I am against the half-assed 12-team proposal that creates more problems than it solves.

Let’s start with the most obvious, which has been the sticking point: who are those 6 conference champions? Is it the top 6 ranked conference champions or do the Power Five champions get grandfathered in? What’s the point of playing college football every year for the 4 conferences that wouldn’t even get a champion into the tournament?

Imagine if the NCAA Tournament for basketball had a cutoff of how many conference champions made the field. It’s almost impossible to imagine because it’s such a stupid, terrible idea. That a similar idea is lauded by college football writers shows they don’t know how things work in reality.

The second big issue with the 12-team playoff — or an 8-team version — is where to play the…