Penn State Sports Magazine
Issue link: https://comanpub.uberflip.com/i/1015973
2 0 1 8 K I C K O F F S P E C I A L TROPHY CASE Do they know the way to San Jose? After sitting out the College Football Playoff last season, Big Ten coaches want back in. Is the league poised to return? Or is it the playoff itself that needs to improve? P enn State's recent football history might look very different if the Football Bowl Subdivision had a playoff system that resembled the tourna- ments that have long been in place in the sport's lower divisions. Two years ago, the Nittany Lions barely missed out on the College Football Playoff after winning nine consecutive games, in- cluding the Big Ten Championship Game against Wisconsin. Last year, the Lions came up just short of a return trip to the league title game, losing to Ohio State and Michigan State on the road by a combined total of four points to fall out of con- tention for a rematch with the Badgers in Indianapolis. The Lions were fifth in the CFP rankings in December 2016 and ninth a year later, so they would have made the playoff field both years if it were as big as some of its most zealous advocates would like it to be. Given those data points, you might expect James Franklin to be an evangelist for a more comprehensive system. Not so. Penn State's fifth-year coach isn't advocating for more teams and might even be OK with fewer. "I like the current system," Franklin said last month at the Big Ten's preseason media gathering in Chicago. "I'm going to be honest with you, I didn't have a whole lot of problems with the system before it." Franklin's contentment with the four- team playoff is at odds with sentiment in some other parts of Big Ten country, where concerns about the playoff have only risen in the wake of the conference's exclusion last year. Ohio State, which had won the first national championship of the CFP era and also made the four-team field in 2016, was passed over last fall de- spite beating three ranked teams during the season, including No. 4 Wisconsin in the Big Ten Championship Game. It was the first time since the playoff was launched in 2014 that the Big Ten was shut out, and the selection committee's rebuke did not go over well. "It's very concerning," Buckeyes coach Urban Meyer said. "I imagine [commis- sioner] Jim Delany and the higher-ups are having conversations that should not happen from one of the premier confer- ences in America. … I've not studied it, I'm not going to study it. It's none of my business. ... But I think there needs to be further conversation about that." | B I G T E N R E P O R T