Virginia fans can continue not caring about football until at least the 2026 season. Because that’s the earliest the College Football Playoff will have more than four teams.
“The Board of Managers has accepted a recommendation from the Management Committee to continue the current four-team playoff for the next four years, as called for in the CFP’s original 12-year plan,” CFP Executive Director said Friday.
The ACC wanted this, you know.
Commissioner Jim Phillips said last month that his conference was united in the idea that “this is not the right time for expansion,” adding that the people in charge need to consider the impacts of NIL, the transfer portal and the changing landscape of the NCAA.
Meaning, the ACC doesn’t seem confident that the powers-that-be can be tasked with the challenge of walking and chewing gum at the same time, which is probably a fair point.
“We have significant concerns surrounding a proposed expansion model, though we’d be supportive of future expansion once and if these concerns are addressed,” Phillips said.
Which is all well and good, but the effect of this decision to delay is that none of the kids currently playing college football who happen not to play for one of the four or five teams that get playoff bids every year will get the chance to realistically compete for a national title, and only a handful of the kids being recruited by those schools might have a shot at an expanded playoff if one were to come in 2026.
That’s the reality, for those kids, for the fans of those programs, for the donors who foot the bills for those programs.
Virginia is one of those programs. Virginia is never going to make a four-team playoff.
Don’t @me. You know it’s true.
The only chance Virginia ever has is if the expanded playoff that gets adopted down the road gives an automatic bid to the conference champion, and somehow Virginia wins its division and upsets the other division winner (whose name rhymes with Clemson) to get in as an 11 or 12 seed.
But wait! Phillips is now pushing a plan that would eliminate divisions so that the ACC can get a workaround to having an 8-4 or 9-3 team win its division and face off with Clemson in Charlotte.
Seems that the 2020 title game with Clemson and Notre Dame tickled the twine in Charlotte (did I say Charlotte? I meant Greensboro; I’m getting ahead of myself) to the point that we’re going to somehow try to make sense of having a 14-team conference with no divisions and no two teams playing anything remotely comparable in terms of schedules and pretend that it’s not an unconvoluted clustermess.
How is Carla Williams able to pretend to go along with any of this nonsense?
If this scheme from Phillips goes through, it makes no sense for Virginia donors to continue to pony up the money to pay the bills for a football program that exists to be the tackling dummies on any given Thursday, Friday or Saturday for whoever the ACC wants to push that year in the CFP.
It’s bad enough that even given the current setup within the conference, the earliest we can realistically expect to have a chance to play for a national title is five football seasons down the road.
It’s asking a lot to get us to keep making the donations and buying the season tickets and spending countless hours outside of all of that caring about what happens knowing that the deck is stacked against us, and the people who are supposed to look out for our interests are part and parcel to the stacking.
This is why there are 20,000+ empties on Saturdays in Scott Stadium, and will be for the foreseeable future.
There are countless better things for folks to do than commit good money and their more valuable personal time to participate in this farce.
Story by Chris Graham
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Chris Graham
