Why the College Football Playoff Feels Broken

There is no conspiracy to keep college football teams out of the playoff. No one is sitting in meetings trying to keep Notre Dame out because of something that happened twenty years ago. What we are seeing is much simpler. A flawed system collided with content-driven platforms that needed something to talk about for weeks before the final selections.

If you want to blame someone, blame the process. Blame the committee. Blame the media for treating every weekly ranking like breaking news. And yes, blame ESPN for turning projections into programming. This was about ratings and ad buys. That is the business. 

Content is king.

I am as guilty of consuming sports business content as anyone. The Tuesday playoff shows on ESPN are entertainment. ESPN paid for the rights and has to make that investment back, so the network leans on the rankings to drive viewership across all of its platforms.

The public and media are furious, curious, and exhausted by the entire selection process. Yet everyone still tunes in. Everyone still reacts. Everyone still debates projections that never mattered in the first place. Only the final selection matters. Everything else is noise.

We watch it anyway, which is exactly why ESPN creates these shows.

Content is king.

We live in a society that is always hungry for content. Sports, entertainment, personal branding, business branding. Everyone is pushing something out. Everyone is trying to stay relevant or informed or visible.

How you build that brand matters. That is where ESPN stumbled this year. The network is now fighting off real backlash because the process felt opaque. Viewers were told one thing one week and something different the next. It created confusion instead of clarity, and that lack of consistency damaged the integrity of the entire process.

The repercussions are already here. Notre Dame has chosen not to play in a bowl game after being left out of the playoff. Fans are frustrated. Analysts are confused. Teams are questioning the criteria. That should never be the outcome of a selection process that is supposed to reward performance.

Content matters.

But the right content matters even more.

Trust matters.