The College Football Playoff has been dominating the news this week and seemingly every week, for that matter, during college football season.
The Athletic’s Nicole Auerbach noticed the dominant space talking about the Playoff takes over in the national conversation and wanted to find out how to fix it. She spoke with experts from around the industry to see if there is room for the little guy to get some more love from the college football media.
One person who knows this topic like the back of their hand is ESPN senior vice president of production Lee Fitting.
“It’s time to take a little reset as far as we’re concerned,” Fitting said to Auerbach in the piece. “Obviously, the Playoff needs to remain a priority A) for the sport and B) for business. But at the same time, I’m worried that we’ve gone a little too far away from what makes college football great — and that is that there is something in every game for the fans out there. It’s not just the top four, five, six, or seven teams who are playing for something.”
It’s a tough task to juggle for Fitting and College Gameday host Rece Davis, who knows above all things the Playoff is what drives revenue and interest from a national audience.
“GameDay has as big an umbrella over the sport as humanly possible,” Davis said. “But if you try to do all that and ignore the monster that is the Playoff, you are not servicing the largest number of your viewers because, for better or worse at this moment in time in the sport, everything is viewed to a degree through the lens of how it impacts the Playoff picture. I don’t think we have to be exclusively in that vein, but we have to accept it.”
The perpetual cycle of just a few teams getting a shot at glory will end if the College Football Playoff committee welcomes a 12-team field. Until then, fans of the MAC and AAC can only hope for a New Year’s Six berth. Check out all the conversations Auerbach had on the topic right here.