The teams landed in Arizona on Monday and will leave Sunday. A long season continued with a month of hype and 60 minutes of football. Each head coach, Ohio State’s Urban Meyer and Clemson’s Dabo Swinney, hoped to extend their season for another 10 days — the national championship game is Jan. 9 in Tampa — but neither wants the season to last longer than two playoff rounds.
Since the playoff started in the 2014 season, talk has revolved around whether it will expand from four to eight teams in the future.
“I always hear the minute that comes up about money,” Meyer said. “I always come back with the student-athletes, class schedules, recruiting, NFL and when these kids make those decisions. There are all those other conversations that other people have because I guess that’s their job. I know after doing it and going 14-1 (in 2014) that if they said we had one more, that’d be a tough one. Especially when you start playing who you’re playing at the end. That year it was a Big Ten championship game, Sugar Bowl, and national championship game. That’d be tough to tack one on the end and say, ‘Go one more.’ I think the whole college model would have to change.”
Swinney, whose team lost in the national championship game to Alabama last season, made his stance clear. He is against expanding the playoffs and always has been. He even defended the old system, the Bowl Championship Series, and said the BCS got it right.
If college football ever expanded the playoffs, Swinney said, it would have to do away with conference championship games.
“I think that we have the right balance,” Swinney said. “I think it’s great. I know there’s a lot of people out there that don’t like the bowl games and you’ve got too many bowl games and all that stuff. As a player, a guy who played and went to bowl games and has coached for a long time, I think it’s awesome for young people to have an opportunity to go and spend time together as a team and to have a chance to finish their season with a win.”
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