Last week, news came out that the Big Ten wants to expand the College Football Playoff from 12 teams to as many as 24 .
Although the Big Ten says it’s just in the talking phases, the resounding NO could be heard around social media from college football fans who think 12-16 is enough teams.
Many pointed out that having that many teams make the playoffs is not only too many, but it makes the regular season almost obsolete.
ESPN’s Paul Finebaum says he thinks he knows why the Big Ten wants to expand the playoff: to add more mediocre Big Ten teams.
"They don't have enough decent teams... The SEC was made fun of because they had 3 schools (Alabama, Ole Miss and South Carolina) in the CFP but nobody mentions the 3 on the cutline,” Finebaum said Tuesday on the McElroy and Cubic Morning Show.
The Big Ten is top-heavy despite Ohio State winning a national championship last year and Oregon being No. 1 for most of the season; beyond those two teams and Penn State, they weren’t very competitive.
Even Michigan had fallen off last year after they had won their national championship the year before. The benefits of adding more teams to the field only benefit larger conferences like the Big Ten, which gives them more chances of winning a national championship.
ESPN's college football analyst Greg McElroy seems to think this is just a ploy by the conference to push for 16 teams. So how do you do that? By advocating for nearly 30 teams, which they know won’t happen, but this is their way of expanding the field to 16.
Expanding the field to 16 teams in a few years is more likely to happen before the CFP ever expands to 24 teams, and the Big Ten knows this.