{"id":659473,"date":"2026-05-23T00:39:08","date_gmt":"2026-05-23T00:39:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/659473\/"},"modified":"2026-05-23T00:39:08","modified_gmt":"2026-05-23T00:39:08","slug":"washingtons-jedd-fisch-proposes-power-four-round-robin-to-enhance-regular-season","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/659473\/","title":{"rendered":"Washington’s Jedd Fisch proposes Power Four round-robin to enhance regular season"},"content":{"rendered":"

Among the more prominent complaints among opponents of the Big Ten\u2019s 24-team College Football Playoff proposal is the expectation it will devalue college football\u2019s regular season. Last week, ESPN\u2019s Paul Finebaum and Mike Greenberg railed against the idea during multiple Get Up segments after the ACC and Big 12 formally backed<\/a> doubling the current 12-team format.<\/p>\n

\u201cTwenty-four is the worst possibility in the history of this game. Why? Because it is going to devalue, dilute, and perhaps destroy the greatest football season of them all \u2014 that\u2019s the regular season in college football,\u201d Finebaum said on May 14th\u2019s Get Up<\/a>. \u201cThe big games at the end of the regular season are going to be meaningless.\u201d<\/p>\n

The day before, Greenberg proposed the possibility Michigan<\/a> and Ohio State<\/a> could be inclined to rest starters in The Game<\/a>, among the most fierce of college football\u2019s annual rivalry games, if both were already assured Playoff spots in a 24-team field ahead of their usually contentious regular-season finale.<\/p>\n

And while those remain serious concerns, Washington<\/a> head coach Jedd Fisch<\/a> has an interesting idea that he believes could help alleviate any potential negative impact on the regular season \u2014 have each Power Four team play a representative from the other three leagues during the first three weeks of the season.<\/p>\n

\u201cI believe, not only should it be a 24-team Playoff, but I believe Week 1 should be Big Ten vs. Big 12, SEC vs. ACC. Week 2 should be Big Ten vs. SEC, ACC vs. Big 12. And then Week 3 should be Big Ten vs. ACC, SEC vs. Big 12,\u201d Fisch said Friday on SiriusXM<\/a>. \u201cI think you should play the three Power Four conferences and then you should play nine Big Ten games, and if you want to schedule somebody else, you schedule them in the preseason.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fisch\u2019s proposal would effectively force the Power Four conferences to come together and create a joint scheduling model similar to how the leagues developed college basketball\u2019s ACC-Big Ten and Big 12-SEC challenges before they ended in 2022 with the advent of the ACC-SEC Challenge as shepherded by ESPN. Of course, since the Power Four leagues have varying number of member teams \u2014 Big Ten (18), ACC (17), Big 12 (16) and SEC (16) \u2014 it might require some finagling, or another round of conference realignment.<\/p>\n

Still, despite the obvious complications to such an idea, Fisch believes the early-season round-robin between the Power Four conferences could also help resolve some of the annual end-of-season debate regarding which leagues are stronger and thus deserve some grace in the final CFP rankings.<\/p>\n

\u201cBecause we need to know how good the other conferences are, so we can determine if a 9-3 Washington team should be ahead of a 10-2 team from a different (Power Four) conference,\u201d Fisch continued. \u201cWe should be able to determine what the markers should look like, and yeah, I see no problem at all with teams that have three losses (in the Playoffs). I actually think, if you win 75% of your games in the New World Order that we\u2019re living in, you should have a chance to go compete for a national championship.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s certainly an interesting proposal, even if it\u2019d ultimately require complete coordination between college football\u2019s real power brokers \u2014 the television networks, specifically ESPN and FOX. And what\u2019s the chance of that ever happening?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Among the more prominent complaints among opponents of the Big Ten\u2019s 24-team College Football Playoff proposal is the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":659474,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[399,140668,398,396,397,99],"class_list":["post-659473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ncaa-football","tag-football","tag-jedd-fisch-94-hanover-park","tag-ncaa","tag-ncaa-football","tag-ncaafootball","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659473","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=659473"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/659473\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/659474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=659473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=659473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=659473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}