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Paul Finebaum insists 2024 College Football Playoff is a ‘terribly constructed system’
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Paul Finebaum saw what every red-blooded college football fan saw on Friday and Saturday.
The ESPN college football analyst saw mismatch after mismatch in the first round of the inaugural 12-team College Football Playoff format, as the home teams took care of business with authority and with no drama.
Notre Dame started off the weekend of blowouts with a 27-17 victory over Indiana on Friday night in South Bend in a game that was 27-3 in the final minutes. Then on Saturday, Penn State took apart SMU, 38-10, Texas ran over Clemson, 38-24, and Ohio State steamrolled Tennessee, 42-17, with the 3 victorious teams all doing major damage on their home fields and easily advancing to the quarterfinals. Clemson was the only underdog to even show up this past weekend.
So, when Finebaum was asked during his weekly Monday morning appearance on the McElroy & Cubelic In The Morning show for his big takeaway from the yawner of a first round, he went after the current flawed system that put these games in place with some questionable teams.
“I think that’s part of it. I think the other one that we already knew is that it’s a terribly constructed system in terms of seeding and allowing conference champions the bye,” said Finebaum. “None of it really matters. We just got fairly disappointing games, and I have a feeling that the audiences were way down due to that and the fact that it was a terrible day to have football, (on) the Saturday before Christmas.”
Finebaum was also disappointed because this past weekend should’ve been a celebration of college football instead of what it turned out to be.
“Mostly, it was a pretty depressing weekend if you’re a college football fan on what should have been one of the great weekends we’ve ever had,” he said.
Cory Nightingale, a former sportswriter and sports editor at the Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post, is a South Florida-based freelance writer who covers Alabama for SaturdayDownSouth.com.
