Funny thing is, Mike Leach wouldn’t even care what some stuffed-shirt foundation thought of his coaching acumen.
He’d be more concerned about, in his own unique parlance, where in the world this college football deal is headed.
So the fact that the College Football Hall of Fame bent its rules Monday and allowed the late coach eligible to be voted into its prestigious club in 2027 without reaching a specific winning percentage, isn’t the story here.
It’s the jumping off point.
It’s where a sport that has lost its compass is ultimately headed, and what can still be gleaned from the quirky, unapologetically honest former coach who thrived at outposts Texas Tech, Washington State and Mississippi State.
Leach lived and loved working in the shadows, finding ways to catch those at the front of the pack with more inherent advantages.
He’s the guy who years ago, in the early stages of the College Football Playoff, wondered aloud why they stopped at four teams? If you’re going to do it, may as well do it like every other championship tournament in college sports.
Have a 64-team field.
He couldn’t, for the life of him, figure out why conference commissioners, university presidents and even some of his coaching brethren, were stumped at how too pull it off.
“Go down to any local recreation center, any one of them in this great country,” Leach told me years ago, when it appeared his talented Washington State team would be left out of the four-team field. “There’s a director of that rec center, and I guarantee you he runs a softball tournament every year. Ask him, ‘Hey, pal, how do you set up a 64-team field?’ He’d have it knocked out in a couple of minutes.”
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But not in this life, not with these university presidents and conference commissioners and their unyielding desire to protect their collective, uh, livelihoods.
These guys have the audacity to stand in corners, and fire off public barbs at each other about how to run the College Football Playoff and divvy up cash from said tournament — knowing full well the ultimate product will be rife with political posturing and pandering.
Automatic qualifiers, or at large bids or a combination of both, it doesn’t really matter. At the end of the day – every single season – someone isn’t going to be happy.
So please, SEC and Big Ten, stop acting like you’ve saved (or are saving) college football. And please, ACC and Big 12, stop acting like you want what’s good for the game.
If the Big Ten and SEC decided the ACC and Big 12 should receive three automatic bids (instead of two in the 4-4-2-2-1-3 format) to the new 16-team playoff beginning in 2026, watch how quickly ACC commissioner Jim Phillips and Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormark would hail the decision as a great moment in college sports.
If ESPN decided to give college football 50 percent more cash for the College Football Playoff if the group used an all at-large field, the Big Ten and SEC would declare that’s what they wanted all along. Equal access for everyone, baby.
Nearly two decades ago, when Ohio State president Gordon Gee infamously said, “They’ll have to wrench a playoff system from my cold, dead hands,” former Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany warned of what he called “bracket creep.”
Back then, when college football was capitulating to the pressure of those who despised the Bowl Championship Series formula of finding two teams to play for the national title, Delany warned that a playoff of four teams would quickly become eight.
And then 16. And then who knows where it all ends?
Because once you take that dip into the playoff lake, all you feel initially are the cool, crisp waters of change. You can’t see the murky depths of discontent.
Or in this case, what’s good now may never be good enough.
It took all of one season – think about that, one season – before the framers of the expanded playoff decided that a 12-team field wasn’t going to cut it. If this thing was truly going to be a fair representative of the elite of college football, it had to move to 16 teams.
And if Alabama misses out again in 2026, or another Big Ten team — in a conference of 18 where a rotating schedule will invariably find a fortunate soul of a team — reaches the holy land without winning a game of significance, then what?
This should come as no surprise to anyone, but the new College Football Playoff contract in 2026 has the same language that the old(ish) contract for 12 teams had. Language that declares the CFP board of governors reserves the right to change the format — and to renegotiate the deal.
How long will 16 teams last?
Bracket creep in the Championship Subdivision playoff, which has been rolling strong for decades, has now reached 24 teams. If you don’t think that can happen with big boy college football, you’re the same person who thinks players shouldn’t be paid.
Which brings us all the way back to Leach, who wasn’t too thrilled about playing players before they stepped on a college field. Throwing hundreds of thousands of dollars at high school players, who may or may not fold under the pressure of (in no certain order):
The next level of competition. The pressure of living up to a contract. University life away from the field. Living and growing as a young adult, while away from home for the first time.
“Sure, let’s just add a boatload of money into the equation and hope for the best,” Leach said. “If you back end that deal, and have most of that money waiting for him at the end of every season based on performance, you’ve got a better chance of it not going off the rails.”
It’s too late for that. This thing already is long off the rails.
Matt Hayes is the senior national college football writer for USA TODAY Sports Network. Follow him on X at @MattHayesCFB.
