From time to time in the NFL playoffs, teams that earn a bye week have a hard time firing up the engines against a team that played and won in the wild-card round.
In the first year of the 12-team college football playoffs, a bye turned out to be ticket to a quick exit.
None of the teams that avoided playing in the opening round won in the quarterfinals. None of them. Boise State, Arizona State, Oregon, and Georgia. They all lost in games played more than three weeks after they last played an actual game.
Meanwhile, the four lower seeds each stayed sharp, winning home games with relative ease while staying in the saddle at a time when their foes lost their edge.
It’s just a one-year sample. But the clean sweep says something.
And, in the end, it will give the powers-that-be ammunition to expand the field to 16.
No more byes. Eight games in the opening round. Sure, it might lead to eight lopsided contests. But it will set the stage for the four best teams (supposedly) in college football to be on a more level playing field against the quartet that punched a ticket to the quarterfinals by punching the lights out of an overmatched opponent.
The better approach might be to stick with eight teams. The four games lost by shrinking from 12 to eight would be replaced by a more closely matched quarterfinal round — with no one getting the boost of playing a December scrimmage against a sparring partner that didn’t know what hit it.
So while the initial inclination will be more, the truth could be that less will be more. That way, all of the teams in the traditional New Year’s Eve and Day bowl games will have the same amount of potential rust to manage.
It won’t eliminate uneven games. It will eliminate a playoff in which, so far, it seems to far better to finish fifth, sixth, seventh, or eighth, instead of coming in first, second, third, or fourth.
