Clay Travis Show: College Football Playoff Expands to 24 Teams, Ohio State Collapses & Dave Chappelle Sparks Outrage

Clay Travis (0:01)

Welcome in Clay Travis Show Monday edition of the program. I'm gonna be on the road for a couple of days, just a little bit of housekeeping here.

Speaking at Hillsdale College tonight, speaking in Houston and Dallas the next couple of days as well. I'll be back Wednesday at some point in time, may be able to do a show on Wednesday. The Clay Travis Show on FS1 will still be up, but I'll be out Tuesday, Wednesday from traditional Clay and Buck Shows. And we'll be back here in front of you guys at earliest Wednesday afternoon, if not on Thursday, just FYI, just super busy schedule. And I'm going to be on the road for several days doing a variety of different things. But we got a lot to talk about today. Seven top 25 college football games went down. I watched 11 straight hours of college football on Saturday, which is about as fun of a way as I can imagine spending a Saturday. A lot to talk about with that. But earlier today, major breaking news for those of us who love college football, a 24-team college football playoff will begin next year. As part of that 24-team college football playoff, there will be four ACC Big 12, Big 10 SEC, four champions that are given a buy into the second round. There will also be a non-power conference team that will be included. That's five, a conference champion. Then there will be 19 at-large selections made beginning next year. The conference championship games will go away. They are moving Army-Navy up a week so that College Football Playoff can begin by the second week in December. Now, I don't know if we have a bracket. They put out a bracket of what it's going to look like, but let me just tell you, eight games on campus for the first round. Second round features eight more games on campus. So the first 16 games of the College Football Playoff, there are 23 playoff games overall. The first 16 will be on college campuses. So the teams that are seeded nine to 16 will get to host a home playoff game. And then in the second round, the teams that are seeded one to eight will get a buy and will get to host a second round playoff game. Then once you get to the final eight, they will move into four different bowl sites. Then the semifinals will be at two different sites, and then you will have one site hosting a championship. This is going to add up to $1.7 billion, and it is a five year agreement.

So I think this is a huge positive. Some people out there are opposed to this. A lot of you are going to disagree with my take on this. I've been a huge proponent of the College Football Playoff for a long time. I love the idea of on-campus games. In fact, in my ideal world, we would do in college football what they do in the NFL, which is every higher seeded team gets to host a playoff game all the way until the Super Bowl, in this case, the National Championship game, which would be played at a neutral site. That's what I hope eventually we're going to reach because I think that the overall value of the college football home field advantage is what makes college football so unique. I think it would preserve to a large extent the importance of the regular season. Because if you have a great home field advantage as many top teams do, you should want to play as many different games at home as possible. It's also a huge revenue opportunity. It's a great way to be playing larger regional games, right? SEC Big Ten out of conference games. There will be some rematches, of course, as occurs in the NFL too. I think this is overall a better move. The conference title games I loved. I have been to, I don't know, certainly double digits I would imagine SEC Championship games in Atlanta over the years. I have watched every SEC Championship game going all the way back to 1992 35 years of SEC Championship games has been a lot of fun. I do think the conference title game era has passed. I think as you expand the playoff, the Carson Beck injury that we saw for Georgia, having to play a 10th game in the SEC, the Big 10, the Big 12 and the ACC against a conference rival is unnecessary. And we can have co-champs. And there certainly many years will be tiebreaker scenarios that will be controversial in terms of who gets the overall championship. But I think what you will see is the top teams will get buys and there will be a strong incentive to win football games. Still, I think what college football fans are going to have to recognize is college football is going to become and already has become much more like the NFL. In an NFL season, you can have teams play three different times, two times in the division, and then you can have a division matchup also in the playoffs again.