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2 0 1 8 K I C K O F F S P E C I A L you're talking about 15 games. That's a lot of games. We haven't expanded the ros- ters." An eight-team playoff could force the finalists to play as many as 16 games: a 12- game regular season, a conference cham- pionship game and three playoff games. Rather than adding another round to the playoffs, Franklin would like to see refine- ments in the process used to select the final four. One way to help do that, he said, would be to encourage more stan- dardization in scheduling practices across the major conferences. "Right now, you've got a group of peo- ple trying to decide who is going to make the playoffs, and they can't compare ap- ples to apples," Franklin said. "That makes it really challenging. When we get to a point where everybody is playing under the same scenario, I think that would be the best situation. So the amount of conference games across the entire country, every conference is doing it the same way, we're all playing the same number of conference games. We're all playing FCS opponents or we're not. We're all playing the same number of Power Five out-of-conference oppo- nents, things like that. If we can control some of the variables, that's going to [help] people who have a challenging job already. When you're comparing one pro- gram to another or one conference to an- other, some of those things don't have to be factored in." The scheduling issue is important to the Big Ten's would-be playoff contenders because they have less flexibility than some of their Power Five brethren. The Southeastern and Atlantic Coast confer- ences play eight league games, while the Big Ten, Pac-12 and Big 12 play nine. The nine-game slates are aimed at strength- ening teams' schedules, but they expose would-be playoff contenders to added risk by forcing them to play an upset- minded conference rival when they could be playing, say, Mercer, as Alabama did last November, or The Citadel, which Clemson faced on the same day that the Crimson Tide were laying waste to the Bears. Ohio State would gladly have sat out its visit to Iowa last season. The Buckeyes had just beaten Penn State a week earlier and were seemingly well-positioned to make the playoff. But they were pum- meled by the unranked Hawkeyes, 55-24, and that lopsided defeat, coupled with a nonconference loss to Oklahoma in Sep- tember, proved too much to overcome. The caliber of play in the Big Ten makes it difficult for even the league's best teams to run the table, and that increases the likelihood that the conference will be passed over. In its four seasons, the CFP selection committee has never picked a two-loss team. Of the 16 teams that have PLAYERS improve on that debut, but not impossible. He'll be running behind one of the best o

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