Lanning told ESPN on Monday<\/a>. \u201cWhat\u2019s happened because of the College Football Playoff is every bowl game has been devalued, the end of the season looks completely different. You\u2019re a failure as a coach if you don\u2019t make it to the College Football Playoff.<\/p>\n\u201cIt\u2019s going to create more opportunity. Just like March Madness is great in the spring for basketball, it\u2019ll be good for our sport.\u201d<\/p>\n
Using the NCAA Men\u2019s Basketball Tournament, which just expanded from 68 to 76 teams beginning next season, might not be the most convincing argument for skeptical college football fans. Much of the pushback has centered around how a 24-team Playoff field would forever alter the way the college football season is structured, including the dissolution of conference championship games, as well as a potential devaluing of the regular season. <\/p>\n
But both Day and Lanning see things differently, and even pushed back on the idea that an expanded Playoff wouldn\u2019t lead to teams already comfortably in the 24-team field potentially resting starters late in the regular season.<\/p>\n
\u201cBecause of how the seeding would work, it\u2019s so valuable,\u201d Lanning told ESPN. \u201cWe\u2019re talking about 24 teams. The value of being the first-seeded team is so much more valuable than being fourth, even, that you\u2019re going to want to make sure you put yourself in that position. Could that happen? It could happen. But there\u2019s so many teams in the conversation, one loss can be a huge difference in being [seeded] 1 or 5 or 8.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ultimately for Day and Lanning, the Big Ten\u2019s 24-team Playoff model represents the best alternative to the current 12-team model, which is entering just its third season since expanding from its original four-team format. In fact, Day \u2014 whose Buckeyes have appeared in five of the last seven Playoffs, including winning it all in 2024 \u2014 the larger model would be more inclusive, which is \u201cgreat for college football in general.\u201d <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The future of College Football Playoff expansion remains one of the more polarizing topics in college athletics, especially…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":653085,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[399,398,396,397,99],"class_list":["post-653084","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ncaa-football","tag-football","tag-ncaa","tag-ncaa-football","tag-ncaafootball","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653084","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=653084"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/653084\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/653085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=653084"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=653084"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=653084"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}