DANKOCHIK’S DRAFTINGS: American college football on the brink

I’m what you consider a complete college football casual.

Every year I act like I’m going to follow the sport more, but inevitably I don’t keep up.

I love the atmosphere, the culture of the sport, the way it can resemble lower-division soccer leagues in Europe, it’s just an all around fun time as an outsider.

But the recent format changes are beginning to tear the sport down to its foundations.

The most obvious is expanding the playoff to a ridiculous 12 teams. I thought eight was the perfect number, and bumping to 12 was a pure cash grab. Honestly, four might have been the right number.

With 12 teams a bad loss, in the past a complete disaster for any program, can be easily overcome. The other knock on is now more and more players are choosing to sit out bowl games. Whole teams are doing it as tantrums for missing out on the playoff, as Notre Dame did.

There’s no way I could evaluate whether Notre Dame getting left out was fair or not — I’m way too much of a casual to have an opinion. But there’s no doubt they put it in the hands of the committee, and missing out on a pity 12th spot is no reason to abandon bowl games. The discussion about who’s in and who’s out is great, but to look at the difference between 12th and 13th isn’t compelling to me.

For years, bowl games have been on the decline, even before the playoff was a thing. Poor attendance was made up for by massive television numbers, and players who were about to turn pro skipped out.

The sport is also dealing with the fallout of becoming the most player-friendly league in history nearly overnight. Players can up and leave any program for any reason nowadays, and sign lucrative cash deals when in the past it was all under the table.

College sports do best when players go on multi-year long journeys with their teams, just look at how Caitlin Clark’s run turned women’s basketball into must-see events.

Suggesting solutions would be silly for me to do, but whatever changes end up coming, the NCAA needs to ensure college football keeps that atmosphere and soccer-style drama that I see as core to the sport’s soul.