Then you add huge conferences, CCGs, and the CFP. Now the lesser schools have almost no chance at backdooring their way into, for example, the Rose Bowl. And not only that, it diminishes the value of something like the Rose Bowl. Even if you backdoor your way into a conference championship (for example let's say that Michigan suffered a couple key injuries in the CCG and Purdue played out of their minds and squeaked to victory), the goal is an NCG and winning a CFP quarterfinal is hot garbage... And a team like Purdue will NEVER get beyond that sort of level. Not only that, if they scrap divisions champions getting into the CCG and make it top two teams, a team like Purdue will NEVER even backdoor their way into the CCG by winning a weak division.
So... What's the point? What are half of the teams in the P5 P4 even playing for? Almost impossible to win your conference, and if you do it only gets you to the next stage of the meat grinder where you'll get pulverized into dust.
Might as well join the f%&^@g Peace Corps...
This fascinates me, I guess because I had become so attuned to it already. After a few years of disappointing after preseason hype, I found the joy in just watching good teams. Or sometimes OK teams. Maybe there's some element of having tasted some pro sports disappointment, where a team finishing a game away from a title against a similar team didn't fill me with thrill that a title was close. It left me more mad that a chance to win was missed, and the contender was soon to atrophy. So if OSU or Michigan has a death machine, I understand the play.
I suppose part of that was being around high schools for a spell. That world is a good reminder that sports basically always end in failure. There's a valuable lesson in that. That you can do the things you're supposed to, but someone else is probably more blessed than you, and ain't a damn thing you can do about it. But there's still something cool about going 9-3 and catching a buzzsaw in the playoffs.
And it's funny because you could be say Auburn is a team that is in that other bucket, and it's not like that brings a different kind of joy. They're as miserable as ever.
(There are also a few random thoughts. The first is that the CCG is a really big factor. You lost participation trophies that did matter to folks. The other thought was that with Purdue last year, it wasn't just that it scrapped in, it was that it scrapped in with a team that was frankly not very good. Like, even if Purdue can't rock with a national title contender, there's no glass ceiling on fielding a top-45 quality team)