There was a time when I skipped writing Mandel’s Mailbag this week because I figured everyone would be focused on their brackets. I’ve subsequently learned that, no, people like reading about college football 52 weeks a year.
But I love March Madness too much to waste an opportunity to combine the two for just this week. Thanks to those of you who submitted crossover questions.
(Note: Submitted questions have been lightly edited for length and clarity.)
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Stewart: With the College Football Playoff at expanding the field from 12 to 14 teams before ever seeing how well (or not so well) a 12-team playoff works, and with (SEC Commissioner) Greg Sankey’s comments about reviewing how team selection is done for the men’s NCAA Tournament, do you foresee a situation in which the greed of a handful of schools and/or conferences hurts the overall popularity of the sport? — Kevin R.
I can tell from many of the questions I received that a bit of news from late last week went largely unnoticed. While the conferences signed off on extending the CFP through 2031-32, the talk about 14 teams has (mercifully) been put on the backburner for now; in fact, Sankey made televised comments about pumping the brakes. But that doesn’t mean it’s dead. I’m of the impression the Big Ten, for one, is still hoping to push it through sooner than later. We shall see.
To your question: The football and basketball tournaments are very different. There’s never been much of a Cinderella component with football, and whatever the format, we know the SEC is likely going to dominate it. Which is why, if it does go to 14, the proposal to put it in writing that the Big Ten and SEC get more automatic berths would be such a stupidly alienating thing. It wouldn’t kill college football’s popularity, in part because most of the biggest fan bases in the sport are within those two conferences. But it could certainly turn off factions of the public.
March Madness, on the other hand, is more delicate. I’ve always felt like it’s actually two tournaments within one. The first weekend is entirely about upsets and buzzer-beaters. Then, over the second and third weekends, we get down to the business of determining a national champion.
I can’t state this strongly enough: If the power conferences do anything that sucks the magic out of that first weekend, it will absolutely destroy their marquee event.
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As I wrote in a column Monday about Sankey’s increasingly alarming comments, the nightmare scenario in a 76-team field would be the Cinderellas that comprise most of the bottom 24 slicing themselves in half before the Round of 64 even begins. You’d lose everything that makes the first weekend special, which would in turn diminish interest in the rest of the tournament.
Unlike the CFP, which is run by the conferences themselves, the NCAA’s Men’s and Women’s Basketball committees govern the tournament. At this point, expansion to 72 or 76 seems inevitable, but hopefully the eight members not from the Power 4 football leagues can at the very least preserve their current access process.
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This week, six men’s basketball teams, mostly from the Power 6, turned down bids to the NIT after missing out on the Big Dance. With the expanded Playoff in CFB further devaluing bowls, do you foresee Power 4 teams who miss the Playoff turning down bowl bids? — Nicholas R.
My first thought when I saw that was, yes, absolutely, this is exactly what’s going to become of the Quick Lane Bowl and the Guaranteed Rate Bowl. Full teams are going to opt out. Especially since bowl season coincidences with an open transfer portal.
But on second thought, there are a couple of big differences between the two. First and foremost: Money.
No one makes money from going to the NIT. But in football, the conferences have contracts with each of their partner bowls that pay them millions (which gets pooled among all their schools), and many coaches get decent bonuses for making a bowl.
Coaches also love getting extra practice, especially for developing younger players. Lots of players who didn’t get a lot of meaningful reps during the regular season start getting first-team reps. Even many of the early-enrollee recruits who arrive in December take part in those practices, though they can’t play in the game.
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And it’s the coaches, of course, who would decide whether the schools accept. While some players may opt out or transfer, the majority will still want to play.
If it does start happening, it will likely be teams whose coaches were just fired. It’s usually a shell of the previous staff coaching the bowl while the new head coach is focused on recruiting and hiring a staff.
So my completely uneducated guess: Yes, some teams will opt out of bowls — but it’s less likely to be the teams that barely missed the Playoff, whose coaches are invested in getting a jump on next season, than the ones who were just good enough to be bowl eligible but still bad enough to get their coach fired.
Oklahoma barely got left out of March Madness. Is this the kind of feeling the school should get used to in football? As they join the SEC, are the Sooners about to become a program that wins just enough to be ranked 13th (or 15th)? — Mike, Claremore, Okla.
For your sake, I hope not, because being the first team out of a 12-team CFP is going to be way, way, way more painful than being on the wrong side of the bubble. I’m aware this year’s Sooners felt particularly stung because they’d seemed fairly safe up until all those 11th-hour bid thieves like NC State prevailed on Saturday night. But deep down, if you’re an Oklahoma fan, you can’t be completely mystified how a team that went 8-10 in its conference and lost its first game in the Big 12 tournament got left out.
Whatever football team barely misses the cut is likely going to be, at worst, 9-3, and possibly 10-2, and probably have a largely indistinguishable resume from the teams right above them. And whereas the basketball Sooners’ reward would have been a trip to Dayton for a play-in game against a similarly mediocre opponent, football skips straight to a winnable No. 6 vs. No. 11 game with a trip to a Jan. 1 quarterfinal bowl on the line.
On the day the SEC bombshell broke nearly three years ago, I wrote a column (very unpopular with Oklahoma fans at the time) arguing the Sooners shouldn’t follow Texas to the SEC, for the very concern you listed: They’re not going to win 10 games every year in that league. They’re just not. I thought they would be better off calling up the Big Ten, which had not yet done its Western annexation, or the Pac-12 (which still existed), both of them leagues where they could regularly compete for championships.
That column might as well have been written in 1931, so much has changed since then. And arguably Oklahoma’s outlook is now worse, not better. Lincoln Riley is long gone. Texas has awoken from its 12-year slumber. The jury is still out on Brent Venables.
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But on the other hand, the 12-team Playoff was not close to reality then. It is now. With it, everyone’s expectations change. And I think you’re selling your program short to suggest they can’t regularly field a top-12 team. In fact, the Sooners finished the regular season No. 12 last year, though that too would have rendered them the first ones out due to Liberty’s slot. And that was with Venables still very much in rebuild mode.
The big adjustment for Sooners fans is that it’s probably never again going to be like it was under Bob Stops and Lincoln Riley, when the Sooners won Big 12 titles more often than they didn’t. They did that in a 12- or 10-team conference with only one other blue blood. Now they’re in a 16-team league that includes five programs with national championships from the last 15 years (Alabama, Auburn, Florida, Georgia and LSU).
Oklahoma men’s basketball has made the NCAA tournament seven of the last 15 years. I’d consider it a win if OU football makes the CFP at a similar rate.
With news of Clemson now joining Florida State in suing the ACC, why couldn’t the networks negotiate with individual schools rather than the conference as a whole? I think it’d be in ESPN’s best interest not to lose Florida State, Clemson or UNC to Fox (or the Big Ten)? — Craig B., Charlotte, NC
If it were that easy, there would be more independents. It’d be tough to buy packages school by school because the quality of schedule would be undetermined. If Florida State and/or Clemson manage to free themselves from the ACC and ESPN really wants to keep them, it’d probably make more sense to steer them to the SEC than to buy their individual rights and hope they can find 12 opponents a year on the caliber of those they faced in the ACC.
I’m extremely skeptical either of those schools have much of a legal argument to free themselves from a set of contracts they voluntarily signed, knowing full well the terms. I imagine that their lawyers, given truth serum, would admit they’re highly unlikely to prevail in a trial. But that’s not necessarily the end game. They could reach a settlement, funded in large part by private equity partners, as Florida State has pursued.
But if the two actually win their lawsuits? No point thinking about whether the Big Ten wants Florida State or the SEC wants North Carolina. Every school in every conference immediately becomes a free agent, and whatever new configuration results from that will look completely unrecognizable from the current one.
Is Florida’s schedule the toughest regular-season slate you’ve seen in your decades covering the sport? And even if Billy Napier makes it to November, does he make it to December? I think my Gators will be a better football team, but its record might be worse because the schedule is too brutal. — Oscar U.
I can’t claim an encyclopedic recall of past seasons’ schedules. One that stands out is 2016 USC, which played three of its first four games against defending national champion Alabama in Dallas (lost 52-6), at Stanford, which had finished the previous season No. 3 in the country (lost 27-10), and at Utah, a 10-win team the year prior (lost 31-27). Later in the year came Oregon, a year removed from its Marcus Mariota heyday, and Notre Dame, which had barely missed the Playoff the year before.
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All told, three preseason Top 10 teams (No. 1 Alabama, No. 8 Stanford and No. 10 Notre Dame), plus No. 14 Washington, No. 16 UCLA and No. 24 Oregon.
For comparison’s sake, Florida’s 2024 schedule using my admittedly unscientific early Top 25 rankings includes: No. 1 Georgia, No. 3 Texas, No. 5 Ole Miss, No. 14 Florida State, No. 17 Tennessee, No. 20 LSU, No. 21 Texas A&M and No. 25 Miami. And Kentucky just missed the cut.
You know your schedule might be certifiably insane when four of your opponents (Georgia, Texas, Ole Miss and FSU) won 11 or more games last year.
But as history tells us, not all these teams will live up to those expectations. Case in point, with that 2016 USC schedule, Notre Dame, UCLA and Oregon all plummeted to 4-8 seasons. The Trojans, after starting 1-3, won their last eight, culminating in a Rose Bowl win against Penn State.
With Florida, I feel fairly confident Georgia and Texas will be what we think they are. Ole Miss has more bust potential. Everyone else could go either way. But with that many SEC teams in the mix, it’s all but guaranteed at least half of them will finish in the Top 25.
Napier’s slim path to Year 4 is twofold: 1) Go at least 9-3, which would likely require beating multiple ranked teams and mark a four-game improvement; 2) Go 8-4, but one of those eight wins is against undefeated Georgia. If even that’s not considered good enough, then my man has no chance.
When Nick Saban retired, most opposing fans and some media immediately sent Alabama back into the 8-4 pre-Saban dark ages. But what if Kalen DeBoer’s Alabama will be better on the field than Saban’s next few years would’ve been? Unlike Joe Paterno and Bobby Bowden, Saban left the team stacked. Nothing is a given in the expanded Playoff/NIL/portal era, but DeBoer may be perfectly equipped to keep the Tide near the top going forward. — Don P.
I admire the optimism, and you make a good point. Rarely does a highly successful coach walk away with his program still at, or very close to, its peak. Usually they stick around too long. Bowden and Paterno are the most obvious examples, but Tennessee’s Phil Fulmer, Michigan’s Lloyd Carr, Texas’ Mack Brown, Virginia Tech’s Frank Beamer and South Carolina’s Steve Spurrier come to mind among. Their successors had to take on varying degrees of rebuilding while still being measured against those guys’ best days.
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With DeBoer, though, it’s turnkey. Yes, Saban’s 2023 team was not among his finest, but it was still good enough to win 12 games, an SEC championship and take the eventual national champion to overtime. Some important players entered the portal, but he’s already picked up some key players and will presumably add more in the spring window.
One caveat, though: At least at first, DeBoer is not going to have the offensive firepower he inherited at Washington. Jalen Milroe was better than given credit last year, but he was not Michael Penix Jr. The Tide’s best receiver, now-departed Jermaine Burton, would not have cracked the Huskies’ first four. And the Huskies’ offensive line was one of the best in the country, whereas Alabama’s was an Achilles heel. It would be unrealistic to expect DeBoer to come in and put up 40 points a game from the jump.
But he’s going to have a lot more to work with on defense. And Kane Wommack has the potential to be Alabama’s best defensive coordinator since Jeremy Pruitt left town seven years ago.
I can’t say whether Bama will be better the next few years than it would have been under Saban. But if DeBoer is as special a coach as I think he is, there should be no 8-4 dark ages. He’s got everything he needs to win big — including a really big paycheck.
Of the 68 teams in the tournament, who would be in your preseason top 10 for football? — Stacey Y., North Ridgeville, OH
Now THAT’s how you combine football and March Madness. Mind you, this basically just mirrors my early Top 25 from late January.
Texas
Oregon
Alabama
Arizona
Tennessee
Kansas
Clemson
NC State
Texas A&M
Kentucky
Most noteworthy to me: Kansas was No. 14 on the basketball committee’s seed list and No. 18 in my early Top 25. Kansas is thisclose to becoming a football school.
(Photo: Kirby Lee / USA Today)
