Arguing about sports is forever a growth industry. But we in the college football universe have proven ourselves standouts in this regard: We don't ever have to even change what we're yelling about!
The "playoff or no playoff?" debate raged for almost 50 years, from the mid-1960s to the early 2010s, and when we finally got one, we immediately began debating about playoff expansion. The "super league breakaway" debate that has picked up steam lately? We've been talking about that one since the 1970s, when the Alabamas and Oklahomas of the world got annoyed about having the same NCAA Division I voting power as the Ionas and Mercers. Conference realignment? Conferences have been realigning since conferences first became a thing, but rumors and power moves have been in fifth gear for basically 35-45 years now. All in all, the player compensation debate is still in its early stages: We've only been arguing about it for, what, 15-20 years?
Year after year, decade after decade, we fight on. A playoff will ruin the integrity of the regular season! And what about the bowls? A super league is right around the corner! People will stop watching if the players are getting paid! Mizzou's going to land that Big Ten invitation any day now!
(Hey, don't scoff at that last one. It wouldn't be the craziest thing that league has done in the last few years.)
Since multiverses are all the rage these days, let's hop over into an alternate universe where, 60 years ago, college football magically did something progressive. Let's pretend for a moment Duffy Daugherty's lobbying for an eight-team playoff, with six conference champions and the top two independents (or, theoretically, champions of other conferences), actually worked.
Daugherty's plan was to leave the bowls alone and finish the entire playoff over three weeks in December. Let's have fun with that idea: Let's say the quarterfinals and semifinals are on campus, and, to placate the Rose Bowl -- and get it to agree to this whole thing -- the finals are always in Pasadena. Conveniently, we'll say this entire thing starts in time for the 1966 season, which had one of the most controversial finishes on record.
For each season starting with 1966, I'm going to simulate an eight-team playoff using historic SP+ rankings. Instead of just picking the favorite to win each game, I'm going to go full ESPN Analytics style and pick a random simulation from 10,000 to determine what would have happened in a given playoff. For the more controversial seasons in college football's recent history, we'll do more of a deep dive on how things might have played out with a playoff in place.
(Note: The first rule of proper What If-ing is that you only twist one segment of history at a time. Isolate your variables and whatnot. An actual playoff coming to fruition in the mid-1960s would have inevitably created countless butterfly effects regarding which programs rise to power and which coaches go where. It probably changes future conference realignment scenarios, too. And I'm not sure conference championship games would have come about in the 1990s if, by this point, we had an expanded playoff. In other words, it changes everything. But we're going to keep team quality, coach history, conference rosters, et cetera, as they were and focus only on the results of a playoff.)