While the 12-team College Football Playoff has largely been met with positive reviews, there has been a major gripe amongst coaches and fans alike.
A team that receives a bye into the quarterfinal round generally must spend just under a month without playing an official game. And some rounds pan out to where a team takes a week-and-a-half or more before playing its next contest.
The idea behind it is likely to give players more rest, coaches times to prepare and programs greater flexibility when it comes to travel.
But many believe the lengthy layoffs diminish the quality of the CFP, and Georgia’s Kirby Smart expressed those beliefs at SEC Media Days on Tuesday.
“So I would love to see — and I don’t make this an excuse — but I would love to see the flow of the season go like a football, a week to week, maybe a bye week in there, but a continuous thing,” Smart said. “No sport that I know of shuts down for 25 to 30 days between performances.”
Echoing the sentiments of another former Georgia defensive coordinator in Dan Lanning, who has also been on either end of the bye conundrum, Smart believes that the best teams should be playing consistently in order to maintain rhythm and structure.
“We have not had our best performances when we needed them most, and I don’t want it blame it on that,” Smart said. “I would love to see a flow of a season be like, okay, which team is the strongest continually playing and going week to week.”
But the veteran coach did emphasize that everybody is dealing with the same reality, and that at the end of the day, the format will continue to improve as time wears on.
“We’ve got some opportunities to do that in the future. I hope we can get to that point. But the format we play with now is great,” the Georgia head coach said. “When it was a two-team format, I was part of it. When it was four teams, I was part of it. You can also argue the opposite, especially if it doesn’t go your way. That’s not who I am.”
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Parker is currently the sports editor for Gulf Coast Media in Foley, Alabama. He's a graduate from Mizzou who has experience covering the Tiger football and basketball beats for SB Nation, and he's worked for a variety of sports news outlets in the past.
