And, suffice to say, he doesn’t even remotely agree with the highly-successful head coach’s evaluation of the current postseason climate.
Nick Saban kicked up a bit of a ruckus by declaring that the College Football Playoffs were his worst fears realized: the devaluing of bowl games. “All the attention, all the interest would be about the four teams in the playoffs, which is exactly what happened,” Saban explained Wednesday.
Never mind that television viewership of bowl games was up in 2014 over 2013 even as postseason attendance was down -- a trend of the latter that the regular season is fighting through as well. And bowl games are being added, not scrubbed. And that college football fans held the same level of interest in the, for example, Belk Bowl during the BCS era as it does during the CFP era.
Still, Saban’s line of thinking is "[t]hat by having a playoff we would minimize the interest in other bowl games, which I think is sort of what happened and I hate to see that for college football.”
In a radio interview Friday, the chairperson of the CFP, Arkansas athletic director Jeff Long, was asked about Saban’s critique of the postseason structure. In essence, Long stated that Saban is out of the loop when it comes to the impact the playoffs have had on those further down in the college football pecking order.
“Well, I think sometimes coaches, particularly those at the highest level, I’m not sure how aware they are of what’s really going on out there in the real world,” Long said in quotes transcribed by al.com. “You know, bowl games, they keep adding bowl games. And I think the television interest for the games is higher than ever before, so I think that’s not only the College Football Playoff, but as we’ve gone through some of those bowl games. So I’m not sure it’s having that effect.”
The bottom line in all of this is that Long is absolutely correct and Saban is dead wrong.
The arguments that a playoff would devalue both the regular season and bowl games were of the straw-men variety prior to the CFP’s implementation for the 2014 season, and they’re the same now for coaches who continue to espouse them. In fact, it was the exact opposite as the run-up to the playoffs gave the regular season more meaning than ever before for more teams -- and fan bases -- than ever. The playoffs aren’t going away; in fact, they’ll be expanded before the sport rids themselves of them.
Bowl games aren’t going anywhere, either -- unless supersaturation sets in. And, to the chagrin of Saban, neither are the playoffs. And that’s a damn good thing for college football.