The College Football Playoff (CFP), a 12-team tournament that will ultimately determine this season’s national collegiate championship, begins this weekend with four games. The winners will move on to play higher-seeded teams, with the 11-game single-elimination tournament concluding with the Jan. 20 national championship game.
Regardless of which squad wins, every team involved in this year’s CFP will be back in the hunt in 2025 with revamped squads, augmented with the largest and quickest gladiators-for-hire money and similar inducements can buy. And while the contributions of influential alums will help pay for renting next season’s athletic soldiers of fortune, the bulk of the costs will be borne, largely through the courtesy of compliant lawmakers, by ordinary citizens who pay taxes and/or tuition.
I believe something of tangible value ought to be at stake in any meaningful post-season football playoff. That’s why America (and specifically ESPN’s programming department) needs the Football Elimination Tournament (FET), featuring the nation’s 12 least-successful Division I programs. This year’s lineup of gridiron sad sacks is clear-cut, since exactly 12 major college teams won fewer than two of the dozen games on their schedule. In the FET, the four worst squads would get byes through the opening round, just as the nominal top four get free passes through the initial round of the CFP.
The FET’s first quartet of games would feature eight one-win, eleven-loss teams. This year’s opening round would pit Dixie State (which, inexplicably, is located in Utah) against Delaware State, with Charleston Southern opposing Purdue, North Carolina A&T taking on Southern Mississippi, and Virginia Military Institute squaring off against Mississippi Valley State. However, unlike the overhyped, over-subsidized CFP, a win in an FET playoff game would entitle the victors to conclude their dreadful season, while the teams they beat would be forced to play on.
In the second round, the four Round One “losers” would play, in order, Kent State, Northwestern State (which, improbably, lies in the not-so-northwestern state of Louisiana), Northern Colorado, and Murray State. Kent State and Northwestern State would merit their pass through the first round by having lost all 12 of their games in 2024. The other two would get first-round byes thanks to having, among the ten teams that finished 1-11, the two worst point differentials. Northern Colorado scored 317 fewer points than their opponents, while Murray State registered an even more abysmal minus 341.
Assuming the higher remaining seeds play their way out of the FET by winning their second-round games, and that Murray State and Northern Colorado subsequently (and mercifully) end their horrible seasons by winning in the semi-finals, it would set up a loser-take-all showdown between the tournament’s last two remaining teams. But why would anyone care about the outcome of a game between two winless squads? Because of the stakes: the loser of the Extinction Bowl, Kent State or Northwestern State, would be required to drop their football program for at least five years!
Many of America’s major-college football programs (which most likely includes every team in the mythical FET) that aren’t affiliated with a major conference annually operate in the red, costing their schools obscene amounts of money. That established, the chance to rid one’s university, at least temporarily, of the fiscal sinkhole intercollegiate football has become would be a prize well worth competing for. <
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