The CFP and the Perils of Incrementalism

It’s time to admit that the College Football Playoff has failed.

Next Monday, Alabama will play Ohio State. It will be the second appearance in the national championship game for the Buckeyes, and the fifth for the Tide. In fact, last year was only year in the seven year history of the CFP that neither Ohio State nor Alabama played in the title game—but Clemson was there for the fourth time.

All told, out of 21 total CFB games, those three schools have made up 25 of 42 sides, or 60%. So, in terms of opening up college football’s postseason, the CFP fares even worse than the reviled BCS, which had 11 different champions in its 16 seasons.

But even worse than the sheer hegemony of those three teams is the failure of the playoff to even produce good football games, as was in evidence Friday. Both New Year’s Day games were blowouts, as has become standard for the semifinal games. Only two out of 14 so far have been decided by less than a touchdown—the average margin of victory in those games is 22. The championship games have fared slightly better, but overall the CFP has proven no better than the BCS at creating fun, competitive matchups. Six of the 16 BCS Championship games were competitive, including a few all-time classic games.

The total failure of the CFP to fix the problems associated with the BCS is ironic, given how hated the BCS was and how desperately people clamored for a playoff. Opposition to the BCS was quantified by pollsters (63% opposed, according to Quinnipiac) and reached the highest levels of government. People were desperate for a “Plus One” playoff system, like the one finally implemented in 2014. And when they got what they wanted, it didn’t fix anything. Some people acknowledge that the CFP isn’t good enough, but their solution—expanding the playoffs further—is both unlikely to happen and misguided. Given that adding a round of playoffs did not solve the problem, it’s unclear why adding more rounds would.

There are important lessons to be learned from this example, about the dangerous lure of incrementalism. Incrementalism is the idea that some small change, even if it’s not enough to truly solve a problem, is better than no change, since it at least addresses the problem and, more importantly, can be a building block for future improvements. There are many examples from American history that progressives point to as evidence of the success of incrementalism: Social Security, Medicaid, the civil rights movement—all of these started with very small gains that were expanded over time into more complete victories.

But the transition from the BCS to the CFP shows the problems with thinking this way—and why some examples of incrementalism “succeeding” are more complicated than they seem. For one, a lot of things that look like success are merely visible changes that can be pointed to, with no real bearing on the problem. The BCS is, after all, gone, so it feels like progress has been made. But, as we’ve seen, these changes have not actually fixed the problems associated with the BCS, namely the bias against schools outside the Power Five conferences.

If anything, the CFP has only amplified the two-tiered structure of the sport. At the same time that it hasn’t opened the championship up for new teams, the CFP has also made it easier for teams like Ohio State, Alabama, Clemson, and Notre Dame to make the championship. These teams can now afford to lose their conference championships or fall out of the top two spots in the AP rankings and still make the playoffs, draining much of the drama from the regular season. It’s the worst of both worlds: an easier path for the teams everyone expects, without any increased hope for teams out of the Power Five (or even many teams in it, to be honest). As a result, college football fans can roughly guess the composition of the playoff before the season even begins. For all the problems with the BCS, it was never so boringly predictable.

In other words, people were wrong to think that a playoff would solve the problems with the BCS. And they were wrong because incrementalism gets people to mistake the possible for the productive. A “Plus One” playoff seemed like an obvious solution because it kept the bowl structure more or less intact, thereby limiting opposition from the stakeholders in the old system. You could build on the same regular season schedule, and include the same bowls, while still having a playoff. It was, in short, a feasible change. But this obscured the fact that people’s real grievances with the BCS weren’t about one game versus three—they were about creating a level playing field for all teams. And simply adding two more teams to the playoff was never going to address that.

If you look closely at a lot of other incremental “victories” you will see the same pattern. For example, Brown vs. the Board of the Ed was decided nearly 70 years ago, but Black Americans still disproportionately attend schools that are underfunded and de facto segregated. The issue wasn’t just a legal distinction between Black schools and white schools—it was that Black students were materially deprived of the same quality of education that white students had. Not only did Brown not solve this problem, but it sent the civil rights down a path of certain incremental victories over others, attacking de jure segregation and integrating high level spaces. These are not insignificant gains, but they come with a cost—the racial wealth gap dramatically increased since the civil rights era.

Which leads to a further problem with incrementalism—that each increment creates new stakeholders in the system. It’s easy to hear people, when discussing the College Football Playoff, say that they should simply expand it to eight teams. This may work, but it is likely to come at someone’s expense. It will lower the advantage teams like Alabama, Clemson, and Ohio State—and, more significantly, the conferences they emerge from—have, so they are likely to oppose such a move. The New Year’s Six bowls, which currently benefit from high stakes, major teams, and proximity to the holiday, are not going to like being moved further from New Year’s, or having to host teams like the University of Central Florida, which don’t bring as many fans as the big schools.

At least when it comes to the CFP, these seem like solvable problems. The bowls and conferences aren’t crazy about expanding the playoff right now, but they don’t seem insurmountably opposed. But this, in general, is a danger of incrementalism. That by pursuing an inadequate solution, you will make a real solution harder to accomplish in the future—not just by deprioritizing the issue, but by creating a new class of stakeholders who benefit from the status quo. This doesn’t mean incrementalism is a bad strategy—sometimes the tradeoff is worth it. But you need to be very precise about what problem you are actually trying to solve, and who stands to benefit from the solution. If the answer is Ohio State University, then you’ve probably done something wrong…