No Changes in Playoff Format for Year Two

Mavric · March 9, 2015

The conference commissioners involved in the early years of the BCS will admit it -- they made some errors.

The lesson learned? Have some patience with this new playoff thing.

"I think it had its place and was overall good, as controversial as it was, but I think we made several mistakes with the BCS, and one of them was that, for a while, we were continually changing certain aspects of it," said ACC commissioner John Swofford, the BCS coordinator in 2000-01 and again from 2008 to '09. "They weren't huge changes, but we were certainly tweaking it, almost on an annual basis, the first five or six years. People couldn't really get comfortable with it, couldn't get used to how things were done, and when you're changing that often, you're basically sending the message, 'We don't have this right yet.'"

Now?

"We got it right," Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott said.

After one historic season in the era of the College Football Playoff, the general consensus among the 10 FBS commissioners interviewed by ESPN.com who comprise the playoff's management committee was a ringing endorsement of success. Don't expect major changes in Year 2 because there won't be any. Part of that has to do with the fact that they simply aren't needed, but it's also because the suits of the sport are more willing to let the system play out longer than they were with the BCS system.

"You would hope we would learn from our history," MAC commissioner Jon Steinbrecher said. "In the case of the BCS, they started it from scratch, so they were building metrics as they went. To think that there wouldn't be a time period of calibration, that's just logical to think that's going to occur. One of the big complaints about the BCS was the lack of the human element. Now we have a big dose of the human element. Some people like it, some people don't. You don't overreact. You let it play out a little bit to really get a sense of it."