At the crux of the expanded College Football Playoff debate was whether or not it was worth devaluing the magnitude of top 10 regular season matchups just for a couple of extra weeks of postseason play in December and January. Those of us who held dear the spectacle of the sport said it wasn’t.
Even we didn’t foresee how right we’d be, though.
Imagine sacrificing the value of those matchups only to see the limited amount of interest that’s been revealed for the first round of College Football Playoff games. A quick trip to online resale ticket markets like StubHub or SeatGeek reveals a major drop in prices for all four games and a ton of available seats.
You can now get tickets to the SMU Mustangs at the Penn State Nittany Lions for under $50. They are under $100 for the Clemson Tigers at Texas Longhorns and are down at $101 for the Tennessee Vols at the Ohio State Buckeyes.
ReliaQuest Bowl tickets between the Alabama Crimson Tide and Michigan Wolverines are $90.
So what gives? How are the cheapest tickets to a meaningless bowl game $40 more expensive than the cheapest tickets to a College Football Playoff first-round game and within $15 of two other games in that round? Maybe the games are too close to Christmas. Fans of home teams could be thinking about tickets to the next round, which are bowl games.
Whatever the reason, you can bet this is not what administrators banked on when they expanded the CFP. Now they’ve got a mess on their hands.
There is already the concern of devalued major conference championship games. The SEC Title game this year between the Georgia Bulldogs and Texas Longhorns, in its return to ABC, had fewer viewers than last year’s matchup between Georgia and the Alabama Crimson Tide. We already mentioned what could happen in the regular season.
If they can’t make up for all of that with extreme interest in every round of the College Football Playoff, it was all pointless. Remember, they are already going to have stunted TV ratings in this first round because the games are going head-to-head with NFL games. The whole point of on-campus first-round games was to drive attendance.
Without the attendance numbers, this entire experiment looks like a failure before it even got off the ground, and it came at the cost of the greatest regular season in all of sports. That doesn’t seem like a worthy price to pay. But hey, what could go wrong with an expanded College Football Playoff? Apparently, even more than detractors predicted.
