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Vo. 1, No. 24
Hello and welcome to another weekend!
They just hit different once football is really over, don’t they?
Anyway, this is another week I intended to have this done and sent out earlier, but I had to take a big fluffy dog to the vet and then various other things got in the way.
But that turned out well because there was some late-breaking news on the Big Ten’s crazy College Football Playoff expansion plans.
We’ll examine that and more after this ad break (please click the ad because it’s worth a little compensation for me and costs you nothing)….
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This week in Ohio State football, we learned the Big Ten’s playoff expansion proposal has dropped one of its dumbest planks, Ross Bjork has some good ideas for changing the college football calendar, Caleb Downs might break the NFL Draft media complex — and the Bengals should do anything necessary to get him….
The Big Ten’s CFP expansion plan still sucks
ESPN got a copy of the latest version of the Big Ten’s wildly unpopular plan to double the size of the CFP, and it contains some notable changes to what was floated before.
Rather than haver a certain number of automatic bids for each conference, now the plan would just call for the top 23 teams plus the best team from the Group of 6 conferences (which will probably be in the top 24 anyway) to make the field.
The top eight would get byes, and the last three rounds would still be at the time they are now (quarterfinals on New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day, semifinals about 10 days later, final in late January).
Everyone gets at least one home game in this scenario before the bowls take over in the quarterfinals as they do now.
I actually started to think this sounded somewhat reasonable when I was reading the story, but then I saw the sample bracket and remembered the dreck this would be letting into the postseason.
No. 10 Miami almost made me look bad for saying the last four teams to make the 12-team playoff are never going to win it, but that’s also the fault of the committee for messing up the rankings so badly. (Mostly overrating Oklahoma and Alabama.)
Anyone outside the top 10 has no case for getting to be in this tournament, but a 9-3 Michigan team that lost decisively to the three good teams it played (then got spanked by Texas in a bowl) getting in should tell you all you need to know about whether or not this is a good idea.
Teams like that were successfully weeded out by the regular season. Let’s keep it that way.
Same for Utah, USC, Arizona, Vanderbilt, etc.
What about the rest of the year?
As part of a long discussion with elevenwarriors.com, Ohio State director of athletics Ross Bjork shared his viewpoint on how to fix one of the biggest problems with college football: The calendar.
(Yes eligibility and enforcing rules is a major issue, too, but for right now it seems like fixing it is out of the hands of the powers that be.)
I’m on board with a lot of what Bjork suggests, including starting the regular season earlier and opening the transfer portal and having spring practice later.
I’ve been an advocate of lengthening the amount of time games are being played for a while.
This is a year-round sport for everyone as it is, and the games are the things everyone wants to play, so the “offseason” shouldn’t be any longer than it has to be.
Start the season sooner but play the same number of games with more time off during the season. This is good for players’ bodies, and, by the way, the TV networks should like it because it gives them another weekend to sell ads for without actually adding games.
(This is also why the NFL should have just added a second bye instead of a 17th game.)
“I think players want to play. They want to play. Give them the right weeks off during the season, but then just play, because then you get in a rhythm and you get confidence as you go along. And I think we could do this in a much healthier manner than what we're doing now.”
He’s for expanding the playoff, which I oppose, though I could live with 16. I don’t see that as fundamentally different than 12. It might even be an improvement since the byes have not been helpful to most of the teams who got them in the first two years of their existence.
No. 1 vs. 16 at home will be a pretty big mismatch so getting a home game you should win really might be better than not playing then starting at a neutral site — as long as no one gets hurt.
Bjork also says the portal should be later in the spring rather than early winter, which has seemed obvious to me from the start so I’m glad someone in power said it.
The winter portal is obviously a disaster for everyone involved as it screws up just about every aspect of the sport from coaching changes to recruiting to the playoff itself.
I would let grad transfers go in the winter but that’s it. They’ve earned the right, and they need to maximize their time at their new school, especially if they only have one year.
If young guys have a harder time getting playing time at their new school, that’s tough, but life sucks sometimes. They’ll catch up.
If this cuts down emotional decisions made at the end of the season, that’s another big bonus for both sides.
Having spring football in May also seems to be superior to March and early April even without considering everything else. It gives freshmen more time to get acclimated to college and the weather will be better, too.
Having less time to recover from a major injury would be a negative, but those are pretty rare anyway and most of those are going to be season-ending at any point in the calendar. Plus let’s be honest they aren’t banging into each other as much as they used to during these practices so the likelihood of serious injuries is not going to be high.
He’s probably right about this helping retention, too, especially at a place like Ohio State.
“I've heard coaches talk about, ‘Well, I don't want to have a portal in April because then I'm going to have to babysit for the whole semester with guys that may not want to be here.’ Well, if we're actually doing this the right way, it's not babysitting. It’s actually communicating. It's working together. It's maybe training them. It's actually maybe developing them into a better player. Or maybe they don't leave, they stay.”
I like doing “spring football” or NFL-like “OTAs” in May, but maybe you go all the way and push them back another couple of weeks and bring in freshmen then instead of at the beginning of the winter grading period. Let those football players get a full senior year of high school? That sounds crazy these days, but it just might work…
The Bengals really need Caleb Downs
I look at most NFL Draft coverage with a jaundiced eye now because there are many people in the draft media complex who are just making stuff up while others are clearly just carrying water for agents.
That said, the hype for Caleb Downs is interesting to see because it might actually be accurate.
If you had any doubts, here’s a nice breakdown from Bengals on SI:
Downs would be an especially crucial pickup for the Bengals since his being able to be a coach on the field would help offset some of the deficit the team faces in coaching on the sidelines.
Drafting Downs would immediately make a weakness into a strength and make several other players on the defense better, too, by making their jobs much easier or flat-out covering for their mistakes.
Downs has a level of awareness that is, in every sense of the word, generational. He seems to know not just what's happening in his area of concern, but the layout of the entire route distribution, almost instantly.
Because of that, he will cheat down or even outright abandon his landmarks when he knows there won't be anything to defend there. Sometimes that is baked into coverage assignments so defenders aren't wasted, but Downs will do it even when it is not. You'll never get to punish him for it either. For the Bengals, this would be huge, as there is SO MUCH air in the middle of the field regardless of coverage. Downs would immediately cover up a lot of weakness inside and immediately ease their issues defending between the numbers.
Last fall, I was thinking he would be a top five pick, but now I am seeing a lot of projections of him going later in the top 10.
Could Downs really slip to the Bengals at 10?
Maybe the better question is if they should trade up because if anyone was ever worth more than one pick — especially to this particular Bengals team — Downs is one…
That’s all for this week, but I hope liked what you saw! If so, please never hesitate to reach out with praise or criticism.
I would also love it if you could share this newsletter with others who might enjoy it.
Oh yeah, and we’ve got more bonus coverage this week!
At MensJournal.com, I noted we know the entire NFL Draft order now.
Did you know the Olympics will have football when they return to the United States in two years?
And if you were wondering when the World Baseball Classic starts and where to watch it, I’ve got you covered.