Pat McAfee’s Call Against College Football Playoffs Opens Eyes as Multiple Bigwigs Sympathize With Kirby Smart & Dan Lanning

The college football fans must be like, “Were we excited for this?” The end of the 2024 and the beginning of the 2025 year came up with some reality check. The 12-team format of the College Football Playoff might have a few highs, but it has been mostly about the misses. At first, it was college football analyst Pat McAfee to address the elephant in the room. Interestingly, he is not the only one right now. Other bigwigs too joined in, exposing the cracks in the newly modeled college football playoff. 

They say “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” Well, no one knows it better now than the College Football Playoff teams. While the offers for bye week initially sounded too lucrative for the teams, they are now paying the cost. Can they be blamed? Definitely not. After all, it’s the College Football Playoff Committee who curated this format. That’s when analyst Dan Patrick on his podcast came up with a comparison between NFL and college football. He started with, “You get a bye and then you get a home game after the bye. But in the NFL a bye week does mean a lot cause you’re in the middle of a week-to-week’s log.”

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He continued, “In college football your last game is either the last Saturday of November or the first Saturday of December. And then your first game is the 20th or the 21st to the 22nd.” This rest period did not serve well. Rather, it has been a bane for the College Football Playoff programs. There is no other option other than sympathizing with Kirby Smart and Dan Lanning. After all, both Georgia Bulldogs and Oregon Ducks had a bad fall. Even though they were supposed to come out strong and make the most out of their bye week. As Emanuel Acho noted, “Each team coming off the bye week has trailed by 14 points before they blinked.” 

The list is pretty long. Georgia is down to Notre Dame 20-3, Oregon is down to Ohio State 14-0, Arizona State is down to Texas 17-3, and Boise State is down to Penn State 14-0. Patrick too came up with the scenario, “For Penn State to lose their Big 10 championship game and then get games against SMU and Boise State and the winner of the Big 10 Championship gets a week off in Ohio State it’s just not equitable right? It’s not equitable.” Now McAfee did find the cracks a few days back.  

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The comfort trap for College Football Playoff teams

Right after Spencer Danielson and Boise State fell into the puddle, McAfee called out the College Football Playoff format. That was because he was quite disturbed by the wild stats. The teams who did not get to enjoy the bye seemed to benefit from the situation. Turned out that they were the ones who outscored the bye opponents 42-3 in the first quarter of the CFB playoff.

That’s because too much comfort often leaves you off the track. On his podcast, McAfee said, “You can also have to get like woken up in the first quarter, which all these teams have had to do.” After all, that has been the case. All four College Football Playoff teams who enjoyed the game were plagued with slow starts and got blown out on the field.

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Like Pat McAfee, his fellow analyst Greg McElroy too was not okay with the bye. The fact that Broncos RB Ashton Jeanty fumbled the ball twice in the first quarter against Penn State did not sit well with him. He stated, “Guess what that team that had it on the line a couple of weeks back, they’re going to be a little bit more buttoned up. And a little more dialed in when they’re going against teams that have not played in the better part of three and a half weeks.” Let’s hope the College Football Playoff committee realizes how the bye is giving rise to rust. That is in turn, feeding on their focus. 

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