(TLSN’s Larry Carlson teaches news and sports media classes at Texas State University.  He is a member of The Football Writers Association of America.)

 MORE WILL BE LESS

Opinion by Larry Carlson for https://texaslsn.org

I’m gonna miss the four-team college football playoff that we can still cling to for just a moment longer.

Maybe I’m the lone wolf.  Or just a curmudgeon.  Or Mr. Cranky.  Go ahead and cuss me as such.  I’ve been called worse.

Just my opinion, but there is no way in hell — or any other locale — that a dozen teams should get a shot at

the national championship.  I mean, 133 teams already do.  We are about to kill what has always made college football THE coolest sport.  The regular season has still mattered.  Long after college and pro basketball, MLB and the NFL opened things up to “create more interest” (read: revenue), college ball’s arduous regular season trail was rough enough to winnow the field out, one tenderfoot after another.  I say the four-team playoff has worked well.

Sure, a few teams have been left on the outside looking in.  You can say all you want that “FSU deserved to be in” this season.  But as Clint Eastwood uttered through clenched teeth in one of his westerns,

“Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.”

Such is life.  We all have learned that lesson, that sometimes cruel fact.

So now we’re about to water things down.  No, it won’t be as silly as Texas high school football has become.

Four teams from each district “earn” playoff spots?  Wow, how many first-and-second-round playoff scores such as 71-7 and 67-zip has that provided us with?  Participation letter jacket patches for some teams that went 2-9.  Sad, really.

But I digress.  We have witnessed the last Ohio State-Michigan game that meant everything to a pair of humongous fan bases.  We’d already done away with the absolute urgency behind Texas-OU at the State Fair, Sure, Texas laughs last right now but it wasn’t so funny back in December ’18.   Bottom line:  We, the people…or maybe just ESPN and the NCAA, are slaying a dragon that was manageable, even great for the most part.  It’s all for a bonfire of financial vanities, of course.

Many of us have the Army-Navy game on some kind of pigskin bucket list.  It’s not just the pageantry that makes the rivalry memorable.  Nor is it the grudging but ultimately shared camaraderie and sportsmanship.  What separates Army-Navy from most all other rivalry games beginning next fall is this:  Your team loses, part of you dies for 364 days.  As one of my longtime buddies has often said, “If somebody’s not feeling way beyond awful after a football game….something’s wrong.”

Over the past five to ten years, I’ve argued with friends, colleagues and sports media students about playoff expansion.  I could accept a six-team carnival with byes for the top two.  It would have made extra-perfect sense this season.  And maybe a sixth-seeded Georgia would even be the favorite.

But we couldn’t just double up four playoff spots to eight.  Nope.  Soon, it will be a not so sweet sixteen.  Count me as a guy who has never understood why gazillions go ga-ga every March when St. Lady of Sorrows has a shot at upending Duke.

They don’t deserve a shot.  

So I’m settling in for the grand treat ahead…Bama vs Michigan and Texas vs. Washington…and then winner take all.  It’s kind of like taking a gander at the last stretch of I-35 in Texas that still has cattle grazing.  Soon, it’ll be gone, too.

I don’t recall every being inspired by singer/songwriter Joni Mitchell for a football story but now I think this line from “Big Yellow Taxi” is relatable:

“Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone….They paved paradise…

put up a parking lot.  Oooh, lot, lot, lot, lot.”     

Ah, hell, maybe I’ll get over it some year when Texas is the 16th seed.