Opinion: LSU's blowout of Oklahoma in Peach Bowl is reason not to expand College Football Playoff

Dan Wolken | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption There may be no stopping Joe Burrow and LSU SportsPulse: From Atlanta, Paul Myerberg and Dan Wolken dissect LSU's demolition of Oklahoma and if there is anything that can stop Joe Burrow and the Tigers from winning it all in New Orleans.

ATLANTA — We must expand the College Football Playoff, they say. We need to respect conference champions and provide more access so that no deserving team gets left out, they tell us.

The notion that the problem with this six-year-old Playoff is that it includes too few teams is now so ubiquitous in the conversation around college football, even outgoing Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany now talks about future expansion as if it’s a formality. The demand from media members, fans and increasingly college athletics officials is too great. The angst among those left out is too pervasive.

But maybe it’s time to take a deep breath and ask ourselves an important question: Are we sure this is what we want?

As No. 1 LSU steamrolled Oklahoma 63-28 in Saturday’s national semifinal at the Peach Bowl — the ninth blowout semifinal out of 12 during the Playoff era including Clemson's 29-23 win over Ohio State later Saturday — one thought loomed large over the proceedings.

If expanding the Playoff is the answer, are we even asking the right question?

College football is not the NFL, where the entire league is engineered for parity. And it’s not college basketball, where a 40-minute game can swing on one or two players having good or bad days.

For pretty much its entire existence, college football has been a uniquely aristocratic sport where the concentration of talent at a small number of programs means only a handful or so begin every season with a legitimate chance to win a national championship. When you weed out a few of them due to injuries or schedule oddities or internal dysfunction, what’s invariably left at the end of the season are a few outstanding teams and then a huge gap to a level where it’s almost impossible for those teams to be competitive.

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Sometimes that gap occurs after the top two. This year, it’s clearly after the top three. Maybe every now and then there are four teams that belong on that level. But let’s be clear: As long as the NCAA allows teams to give out 85 scholarships, there are never going to be seven or eight.

It’s certainly possible that the selection committee made an error in choosing Oklahoma this year, though the Sooners were a logical choice as the one-loss Big 12 champions based on their protocols. Maybe Oregon, which had two losses and won the Pac 12, would have given LSU a nominally better game.

But that’s not particularly relevant to the overall point: If you expand the Playoff to eight, you’re adding four more teams that are similar in quality to Oklahoma. And what would that really accomplish, other than ensuring the No. 1 and No. 2 seeds play worse opponents?

If you think these games have been blowouts, are we really sure we’d want to see LSU-Memphis or Ohio State-Baylor?

Remember: If there were an eight-team playoff this year, Oklahoma would have played No. 5 seed Georgia in the quarterfinals — the same Georgia team that lost to LSU by 27 points three weeks ago. Hey, it might have been a good game. And the winner would have earned the right to … get blown out by LSU in the semifinals.

When you think about it that way, expanding the Playoff starts to feel a little bit pointless. Sure, there would be a lot more hype across the country every year because every conference would be included. Most of the matchups would sound sexy on paper, and having quarterfinal games on campus sites would be cool.

But if you’re not improving the competitiveness of the games and instead just doubling the number of lopsided outcomes we’re already seeing with the current format, there’s not a lot of long-term upside to making the field bigger.

While the four-team Playoff is undoubtedly an improvement over the BCS for a whole lot of reasons, it’s completely logical that the semifinal games have largely been duds. With teams having nearly a month after their conference championship games to heal their minor injuries and prepare for a specific opponent, the favorites are generally not going to come into the Playoffs worn down or unfocused.

When the best teams all year long get to play less talented opponents under near-perfect circumstances, this is generally what you’re going to get. Nearly every time, the favorites are going to advance, and usually without much drama.

Anyone who watched college football closely this season understood that the way LSU dominated Oklahoma in the Peach Bowl was very possible, if not likely. LSU was better on offense, better on defense, physically superior and faster. Upsets happen sometimes in sports, but there was almost no combination of circumstances that would have allowed Oklahoma to actually have a chance in this game.

Quarterback Joe Burrow had seven passing touchdowns at halftime. LSU had nearly 500 yards of offense in the game’s first 30 minutes. It was the biggest beatdown in Playoff history, orders of magnitude greater than Clemson’s 31-0 wipeout of Ohio State back in 2016 or Alabama throttling Michigan State 38-0 in 2015.

And as long as teams of that quality come into the Playoff with most of their significant players healthy, we’re going to see similar type of games again and again.

That doesn’t mean the four-team Playoff is a failure. It’s just the nature of the sport.

This season, there were three teams that deserved a chance to play for the national title. Last year, there were really only two. At some point in the future, there might be four or five.

But the hunger to expand the Playoff to eight is slowly but surely taking over the sport, and when it happens many will cheer it as progress. Maybe it is.

Inevitably, though, an expanded playoff means the gap between the quality of opponents is going to get bigger, not smaller. If the goal is to get better games that won’t bore us like Saturday’s Peach Bowl, that surely isn’t the answer.