Michigan football's Jim Harbaugh is right. Time to expand College Football Playoff

Shawn Windsor | Detroit Free Press

Show Caption Hide Caption Jim Harbaugh on why Michigan football is playing better Michigan Wolverines football coach Jim Harbaugh speaks to the media on Monday, Nov. 25, 2019, in Ann Arbor.

Jim Harbaugh has a plan. And if his Michigan football team upsets Ohio State Saturday – and you love his Wolverines – you're going to wish that plan was in place.

If it were, U-M would be playing for a spot in the College Football Playoff. Rewarding a team that is considerably better than it was two months ago.

You know, as it’s supposed to happen in team sports, only doesn’t happen in college football, at least not at the Football Bowl Subdivision level.

Maybe you recall Harbaugh’s plan. Or maybe you dismissed it as self-serving lobbying because his team has lost two games and has no way of making the College Football Playoff under the current system.

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In any case, as we get set for U-M's biggest game of the season, let’s revisit what Harbaugh laid out a few week:

An 11-team playoff.

How would it work?

Each Power 5 conference sends its winner based on a 12-game schedule. Conference championship games would disappear.

Add in the top non-Power 5 team and five at-large teams based on the old Bowl Championship Series rankings, using computer models and strength of schedule.

The top five teams get a bye. The other six play on the weekend reserved for conference championship games. The losers get put in the bowl system, the winners seed into quarterfinals with the five teams that earned a bye.

The quarterfinals would be played in early December, on the same weekend of the Heisman Trophy ceremony. The semifinals are still around New Year’s Eve. The finals a week or so later.

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That’s a 15-game schedule for the two teams that make the championship game. If the team happens to come from the bottom six, it would play 16 games.

On paper, it’s not a bad model. Harbaugh put together a spreadsheet of sorts – using last year’s final, regular season rankings – to show what it would’ve looked like. U-M would’ve slotted into the No. 8 spot and played on the first weekend against Central Florida.

If Harbaugh wanted to get more radical, he could suggest conference teams play only against themselves during the regular season. And that the independents of the world – hello, Notre Dame – would have to fend for themselves or join a conference.

After all, it’s not like Alabama is traveling to Columbus or State College in September anyway.

The Crimson Tide’s schedule is actually a good argument for a 12-game conference-only schedule. Alabama played a neutral-site game to kick off their season against … Duke. So it’s not like college football would be robbed of many high-level, non-conference game early in the season.

For every time there is a matchup like Ohio State versus Oklahoma, there are twenty matchups like Clemson and Charlotte or Michigan and Middle Tennessee State. Besides, we’d get to see many of those cross-regional matchups during the actual playoff.

Like Washington-LSU, which would’ve been among the three early-December games scheduled last season under Harbaugh’s system.

Another bonus is getting rid of the conference championship games, which pulls its participants from artificially created divisions within a conference. Those divisions are usually based on geography, not talent.

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Harbaugh is aware of this in the Big Ten, where his Wolverines have to get through Ohio State, Penn State and Michigan State just to get to the conference title game, even if MSU is not where it was four years ago.

Playing 12 of 14 teams in the conference is a truer – and more revealing – test than a conference title game. Yes, a team could catch a scheduling break and not have to play Ohio State. And if scheduling luck turned out to decide the conference winner too often, then conferences could keep their title games and play 11 regular-season games within the conference.

Or the playoff could be expanded to 16 teams or even 28. This is how it works in Division II, where the NCAA sets up four, seven-team regionals with the top seed in each getting a bye.

Division II teams play 11 regular-season games. If a team makes it to the championship, it plays 16 games. If it’s good enough for Division II, it should be good enough for the Bowl Subdivision.

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Not only would a national tournament produce a more representative champion – not to mention increase interest and replace a several bowl games that few watch or attend – it would allow for teams to improve.

As many of the best teams do in most other team sports.

Harbaugh has just such a team this season. He made big offseason changes. It took a while for the changes to take hold. And if U-M were to pull off the upset Saturday against Ohio State, it would get rewarded, whether the playoff were 11 teams or 16 teams or 28 teams.

Isn’t that what we want?

Contact Shawn Windsor: 313-222-6487 or swindsor@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @shawnwindsor.