8 team playoff, no automatic bids, no first round byes, no special favors for Notre Dame or G5. Just the eight best teams would do wonders for this sport.
That's even worse.
What I hear around here is that people want individual games to matter. They want the regular season to matter. [Some of them] want conference championships to matter.
Going to 8 without any auto-bids tears all of that down, and all you get in return is some more money for the TV networks.
If you have 8, a conference championship doesn't matter. With 4, the committee has proven that it doesn't mean everything, but it still means something, in the selection process. You have to be special to get in without a conference championship.
If you have 8, you'll be getting teams with multiple mulligans. You'll get a 10-2 SEC team that didn't even qualify for its championship game, that has won nothing of note, that has earned nothing.
If you have 8, you'll have even more teams "scheduling wins" OOC than they currently do, because a team will KNOW that being 11-1 and not going to their conference championship game is enough. Ohio State couldn't survive a pasting by Purdue in 2018. They would with 8 teams.
The
ONLY point of going to 8 (or 12) is to allow auto-bids. That's the only reason I'm in favor of it, actually, because then P5 conference championships are always meaningful. If you're not going to go auto-bids, might as well stay at 4.