Imagine creating conferences for college football that are so big that you can’t play everyone, then not creating divisions to instill some sort of order and understand to what we’re watching all year, then still trying to crown a regular season champion using a title game- what could go wrong? Then imagine creating a playoff bracket so big that you can have three to five SEC and B1G Ten Teams make it. You’d have a total mess, right? Like imagine a world where the ACC Champion doesn’t make a twelve team field?

Well, the NCAA delivered you a real mess to enjoy. I’ll start by saying I’d have a playoff system with just a couple of conference champions, because how can you be the National Champion and finish like fourth in your own league? I get it though, no one cares about finding the best team, you all just want to have fun and have your schools get even more money. Hey, that’s understood. This is what you get then.

The ACC is an utter embarrassment. How in the blue hell does 7-5 Duke *win* the tiebreaker with 10-2 Miami (I know, both went 6-2 in conference, but what kind of stupid tiebreakers did you set up?) to finish second in the conference regular season and get a chance to go beat 10-2/7-1 Virginia for the conference title? This is batshit. Why do you have a conference of 17 teams with no divisions to begin with? Then you have the six game deal with Notre Dame where you pay them $20 million for three or four games where they play on the road against your teams, basically because it adds about $10 million to your TV deal for all 17 teams (each). Look, should it be a good thing to have your conference play more nationally televised games on both Notre Dame’s and the ACC’s networks, where you play better competition? Sure. That is until Miami predictably wins against them in week 1, only to be a complete disappointment losing to sub-standard teams during the season, while Notre Dame stacks up five blow out wins against your teams and clearly passes the underwhelming Hurricanes. Everything about this conference is just madness, right down to SMU blowing an easy shot at the title game in the late hours of a Saturday night at Atlantic Coast Conference rival, California.

Then you have the SEC and Texas, who lost their third game weeks ago and now wants us to forget all of that and give them credit for beating a couple of conference foes during the year. Of course, they leave out that they got killed by Georgia and lost to an awful Florida team when they tell the story. Alabama has two losses, but even if they lose a third on Saturday, the playoff committee conveniently moved them up a spot or two to justify putting them in as a three loss team. Sure. Best of all is Ole Miss though. You go 11-1 and don’t make the conference title game (which we could also say about Texas A&M), then your coach is like “fuck it, I’m out” and leaves you ahead of a potential home playoff game, only go to a conference school in the state next year that can best be described as dysfunctional.

Notre Dame? You mean the team that lost their first two games by 4 points and kind of found new ways to lose each? Sure, they played 10 power 4 games, and sure Boise State, Navy, Arkansas, and USC end up as their “good” wins, but really who did most of their detractors win over? You can’t tell me Navy or Boise might not beat SMU. Both played Notre Dame reasonably similar or better than Pitt, who almost won the ACC. Look, I agree, Notre Dame did not beat a real murder’s row, but they probably did as much as all the other contenders, and well, they lost to two pretty good teams. Not Florida State. Not Florida. Not Louisville. They are not clearing a high bar, and frankly losing to Miami is only arguably a good loss. But yeah, they are clearing the bar we have.

Are my going to write about the Big 12? No, I’m not. I’m still amazed that a relatively good coach wanted to stay at BYU over Penn State. In a world with justice, he’d now lead his team to a win over Texas Tech, and then we can just put both in as participation trophies to lose in week 1. But we’d all feel good about it.

The B1G really was only decent this year. Go ahead, get mad. Three teams belong in. Another three are pretty decent, but not playoff teams. After that, slop. But I want to talk about Penn State for a moment. Wtf? Have we really reached the point that literally no one wants their money and their job? I get it, it’s hard to play Ohio State, Michigan, USC, Oregon, and Washington. You have an astronomical budget though and they’ll pay you out the ass. But you’d rather stay at Louisville, or go to South Florida, or even go to UCLA (Ok, for the beaches, yes). If their season isn’t bad enough, this humiliation is awful. Seriously, just hire Chip Kelly at this point, I dare you. #TrustInChip

I’m not even going beyond this. I’m actually cheering for Duke to make a complete circus spectacle out of this. Let’s figure out how to get like six unqualified shmuck teams in. What could be more fun?