Stats show automatic bids to an eight-team playoff is stupid. Logic confirms it.

Hey, so you know that eight team playoff that everyone and their mother seems to campaign for whenever things get just a little too quiet in the college football machine?
Maybe it comes to fruition in the near future. Maybe it doesn’t. Though it seems like a decent bet that somebody or some entity will make it a reality while most of us are still around to see it.
I could offer you my thoughts on why Western Civilization is likely to carry on even if we should actually wait another few years before blowing the current four-team format to hell. But honestly, who cares about dumb stuff like sample size when making rash decisions, right?
Anyway, since we’re assuming a move to eight teams is ultimately inevitable I thought it might be helpful for those spurring on this runaway train to at least be informed, so as to not screw things up even more. We’ll all survive an eight-team playoff world to be sure, but I might personally lose my ‘stuff’ if I hear another voice in the sport act like automatic bids is one of the components that would make eight so great.
How we got here
As a brief refresher it might be helpful to consider how we arrived at this likely approaching ‘revolutionary’ moment in time in the first place.
Let’s start with the basics of the existing model.
At the FBS level of college football you’ve got five power conferences (P5) and independent Notre Dame, a group from which everyone assumed would overwhelmingly make up the top four teams in any given year with the inception of the current playoff system.
That’s four playoff spots and five power conferences to fill them (plus Notre Dame).
That’s four playoff spots and six major entities to fill them.

It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that at least one of these P5 conferences was going to get left out of the top four each year, with the Fighting Irish always lurking around to potentially bump that number up to two. And unless you think that the P5 conference commissioners are a bunch of morons (Larry Scott ducks head); guess what, they knew this stuff too.
Now you could argue that they didn’t fully appreciate the gravity of such circumstances when the playoff was first created. That’s fair. When you’re the Pac-12 or the Big Ten and you miss out on the action a few years in a row, one can see how that might alter your previous attitude toward the system just a bit.
But regardless, we’re talking about the simple math of implementing said system that, by its very nature, was going to annually exclude at least one of the major entities within it no matter what. A surprise this was not. I hope?
The stupid ‘fix’
Alright fine. So you want to better your odds of never having that feeling of being left out on the fun again. Angst-ridden teenagers all around the world salute you. The sentiment is real.
So we double the current set-up and make the playoff an eight-school affair. Cool.
But wait, this “I love you” message to the P5 conferences still isn’t enough security. Just saying the words is easy (I’m told). But you’ve got to put a ring on it to give them total peace of mind.
Say hello to automatic bids for P5 conference champions.
And since we’re all nothing but altruistic in our motives, let’s also tack on an auto-bid for the highest ranked Group of Five (G5) school in a given year.
There. Problem solved…but not really.
Striving for an intelligent solution
The easiest way to explain why handing out P5 automatic playoff bids is a terrible idea, much less allotting an additional one for the G5, is as follows:
It would be a ‘solution’ to a problem that doesn’t really exist, especially for the Power Five conferences that, let’s just be honest here, control the playoff system.
If you go to an eight-team field, modern college football history will smack you upside the head and tell you to your face that you’re being an idiot to think that a bunch of excellent P5 conference champions get left out in this given scenario sans automatic bids.
How do I know? The data shows it if you’re simply diligent enough to look.
Let’s go back to the 2005–06 season.
Desmond Howard graced the cover of NCAA Football ’06, a game that I personally invested a good seven years of my life into. Texas topped USC for the BCS Title in an all-timer at the Rose Bowl. But more importantly, it marked the first year of the BCS era with a finalized Harris Poll component.
Was the BCS ranking system perfect? Hell no. But it did incorporate human polling and computer metric evaluations, a primitive method of our more comprehensive assessments of teams that have become commonplace today (eye test, SOS, OFF/DEF efficiency, etc.).
That 2005–06 cutoff date also gets you into the second year of post-Big East/ACC realignment that sent former Big East powers Miami and Virginia Tech, along with Boston College (a year after the others) to the ACC. Almost a decade before the ‘Power Five’ term became a go-to reference in the sports’ lexicon, that Big East exodus essentially secured such a hierarchy the moment it was completed. The ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12, and SEC now stood alone and largely unchallenged.
Add the final nine years of BCS-era data to the current five-year run of the four-team CFP and you’ve got yourself an appreciable sample size of 14 combined seasons to look at.
During that time period a total of 11 Power Five conference champions have fallen outside of the top eight in the final BCS/CFP rankings of any given season. You can do the math; that’s less than one a year (0.79 per season for you uber nerds).
Of those 11 conference champions during that 14-year period, the average end-of-season ranking was approximately 14.7. That number is only approximate because one of those 11 P5 conference champs was Wisconsin in 2012. Those Badgers (8–5) actually finished unranked in the final BCS poll, so I’ve assigned them a hypothetical value of 26 as the highest possible unranked team of that year.
And even that might be a bit generous, as Wisconsin dropped out of the AP poll following a Week 2 loss and never returned to the top 25 for the rest of the year, not even after a “Stop, stop, they’re already dead,” 70–31 evisceration of Nebraska in the Big Ten title game. (Yes, that really happened, and yes, it was kind of horrifying to watch.)

But even with the benefit of the doubt given to Bucky Badger & Co. that particular season, essentially, under a hypothetical eight-team playoff format, an automatic bid system would have (to this point) ensured that the 14th or 15th highest rated team in the country makes the field in roughly four out of every five years.
(Files under things not worth ‘saving’ in college football.)
Wait, there’s more.
Of those aforementioned 11 P5 champs left on the outside looking in, two of them — ’05 Florida State (8–4, 22nd in the BCS) and that unranked 2012 Wisconsin squad — had another team from their own conference that same season who would have made an eight-team field as an at-large selection.
Eighth ranked Miami would’ve carried the ACC banner into a hypothetical eight-team playoff in 2005, and in 2012 Ohio State (3rd in the final AP Poll) actually capped an undefeated regular season at 12–0, but was ineligible for postseason play in the aftermath of Tattoo-Gate.
So in reality, during the 14-year period under examination the P5 conferences (champs or not) would have missed out on the top eight on a collective nine occasions. That’s 112 available ‘playoff’ spots in total, and nine times one of the big boy leagues just couldn’t make it.
What a damn shame…
Furthermore, in the current four-team playoff era only once has a P5 champion not finished in the top eight. It happened for the first time this past season with #9 Washington; the same Huskies team that lost 10–12 at (6–6) Cal, in addition to defeats against (7–5) Auburn and in Eugene to the (8–4) Mario Cristobal quack attack. All of this before triumphing over Utah in the ultimate rock right of a Pac-12 championship game by a tally of 10–3.
But thank God for auto-bids, as it surely would’ve been a crime not to include such a vast assortment of ‘accomplished’ P5 champs over the last decade-and-a-half, a la the 2018 Washington Huskies.
But what about the little guys??
So glad you asked.
Now we can also point out the insane overzealousness in handing out auto-bids like candy to the ‘less fortunate’ of the sport.
For instance, you might be surprised to know that during the same 14-year window as with the data presented above, nine G5 teams have finished in the top eight at the close of a regular season.
It’s happened nine times.
And both the 2006 and 2009 regular seasons saw multiple G5 teams make the cut. That’s like…more than one! And it happened twice!
For all of the whining and complaining that we’ve gotten in recent years over the allegedly heinous disrespect and mistreatment of the G5 crowd in regards to a spot in the top four, it feels as though we also kind of stink at contextualizing how the sport has shown itself to treat them in the modern era.
Nine top eight finishers over a 14-year period feels like a pretty healthy amount of representation. And these scrappy underdogs haven’t exactly snuck in by the skin of their teeth either.
Twice they’ve finished eighth (including UCF last season), seventh once, three times in the six-hole, fourth on another occasion, and twice all the way up at number three, right on the cusp of inclusion for a title shot even in the days when the BCS picked two teams and told everyone else to get lost.

And not only has there been volume, but variety. Yes, the brand that we all know now as Boise State makes up three of those top eight finishes. But it’s buoyed by five other schools in TCU (x2), Utah, Louisville, Cincinnati, and UCF.
(TCU, Utah and Louisville would eventually move on to the Big 12, Pac-12, and ACC respectively.)
For the most part these teams weren’t exactly pushovers either. Cincy got waxed at the Superdome by Florida in Tim Tebow’s last hurrah in the Orange & Blue, and UCF kinda sorta hung in there with LSU last year in a closer-than-the-score-indicated Fiesta Bowl. But in large part the top eight G5 finishers of recent memory have shown up and shown out when called upon.
It’s almost like the amalgamation of polls/rankings somewhat knew what they were doing in awarding these teams such lofty rankings when they did. What an odd concept, rewarding true excellence when you see it.
(Insert clamoring for the inclusion of twice as many G5 schools because my previous point only ‘proves’ that there are numerous little guys out there who can go toe to toe with the big boys.)
You can call hindsight 20/20 all you want, but people who have really been tuned in to the sport over the last 14 years will remember that a significant number of these G5 teams were recognized as legitimate threats in their own present day.
It was not a mystery that a number of those Boise and TCU squads over a 4–5 year period were the real deal. Not only had they previously accrued high profile bowl victories to puff their chests out about, but they also backed it up by taking names and kicking ass in the regular season where the opportunities presented themselves.
Meanwhile, Utah, the lesser recognized mid-major power of the time period, posted a 79–22 record over an eight-year run beginning with Urban Meyer’s two season stint in Salt Lake City and ending in 2010. That stretch included two undefeated seasons (with BCS bowl wins over Pittsburgh and Alabama) and three others of 10 wins apiece.
Cincinnati won at least 10 games five times in a six-year span from 2007–12 under the guidance of head coaches Brian Kelly and Butch Jones.
These were good teams. Smart football people (you know, like the folks we want elected to the CFP committee) knew that they were good teams. And they were typically ranked accordingly within the upper echelon (top eight) of the sport.
That’s what people say they want now, and that’s largely what we’ve gotten in the past, even with the more rudimentary metrics for measuring relative team strength available at the time.
In eight of the 14 years in question, G5 teams have failed to make the ‘cut line.’ And you know what? Good.
When you average the rankings of the top G5 school from each of those years — 14th, 10th, 15th, 15th, 20th, 19th, 15th, 12th — you’ll find that we’d have been ‘deprived’ of watching roughly the 15th best team in America compete for a national title on eight different occasions.
I’m more than OK with that.
So stop trying to pander to the ‘little guys’ and embrace a system in which we evaluate and identify the truly excellent ones for inclusion in whatever premier postseason format we happen to be using in the future. We know it’s doable. It’s been done before.
But get this automatic bid nonsense out of here. It isn’t needed, and it only reinforces the ‘hand-out’ sentiment that these schools should balk at anyway.
We don’t want charity cases in the College Football Playoff, be it a field of four teams, eight teams or more. And no self-respecting program should want to be included in a playoff system as a charity case either.
A reasonable compromise
Look, I’m not exactly itching to move away from the current four-team playoff. I love the fact that a loss (and especially a second loss) still matters. This sport has stood apart from its peers for decades because the regular season is a pins and needles affair for every fan of every team.
One misstep and all of your hopes and dreams for a championship season can be snatched away in an instant. And that feeling has remained mostly intact through the half-decade foray into our present system. So I would hesitate to double the field to eight, though I both recognize and would accept the perks that might come along with such an evolution.

But if eight is the ultimate destination for this sport’s annual postseason tournament than be smart and do it right.
I can confidently say that neither of those directives applies to offering up automatic playoff berths; not to the Power Five, not to the Group of Five, not to anyone.
If you’re being honest with yourself, nobody would have been missing 2018’s Washington Huskies from an eight-team playoff, just like they wouldn’t miss 2014’s #20 Boise State or 2012’s Wisconsin Badgers
Big school or small, blue blood or plucky upstart, at season’s end you’re either a top eight team or you’re not.
No charity cases allowed.