🏆 The College Football Playoff is Broken, But Fixing it Could Make Things Worse

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It’s not often that I get to talk about one of my hometown’s greatest institutions, UW-Green Bay, but thanks to the school’s head basketball coach, Doug Gottlieb, I get to walk you through one of the greatest crashouts of 2024.

More on that at the end.

In today’s newsletter:

🗞 The Big Story: The College Football Playoff is Broken, But Fixing it Could Make Things Worse

📉 Biggest Loser: The Guardian-Cap Alternative That No One Is Talking About

🏆 Winner’s Circle: The $10,000 Solution to College Football’s Oldest Problem

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🗞 The Big Story

The College Football Playoff is broken, but there’s a chance that trying to fix it could make things even worse.

New Format: Ahead of the first-ever 12-team College Football Playoff, fans have complained that the seeding system is “broken,” saying that just because you win your conference doesn’t mean you should get an automatic bye.

And I agree.

The fact that the 5th and 6th seeds arguably have an easier path to the semifinals than the 1st or 2nd seeds doesn’t seem right.

But while many people are suggesting that byes just be given out to the top four ranked teams instead of conference champions, they’re missing the potential impact of that decision.

New Payouts: The way the CFP is set up right now, all Power Four conferences split 80% of the playoff revenue equally, with the Group of 5 conferences splitting the remaining 20%.

But starting in 2026, the Big Ten and SEC will each take 29% of the pot for themselves.

Leaving Notre Dame, the ACC and the Big 12 to each receive 11% of the revenue and the Group of Five schools having to split the remaining 9%.

This means that regardless of how many Big Ten or SEC teams get into the CFP, both conferences will receive an estimated $21 million per year starting in 2026.

Now, to counteract this structure, the College Football Playoff set up a payout system based on how far each team advances. This way, even the schools in the smaller conferences can cash in on the expanded playoff.

• $4 million for each of the 12 teams that make the College Football Playoff

• $4 million for each of the 8 teams that advance to the Quarterfinals

• $6 million for each of the 4 teams that advance to the Semifinals

• $6 million for each of the 2 teams that advance to the National Championship Game

Second-Order Effects: This structure means that teams who received a first-round bye have already earned a total of $8 million ($4 million for making the playoff and another $4 million for already being in the Quarterfinals).

But if the committee were to change who got these byes away from conference champions and instead give them to the top four ranked teams, then it’s possible that schools like Arizona State and Boise State would be missing out on guaranteed payments that would help them keep up with the larger conferences.

So unless we want all SEC and Big Ten schools in this thing every year, maybe we should let conference championships mean something and keep the automatic byes.

📉 Biggest Loser

This helmet cover is designed to be safer than a Guardian Cap. So why is nobody talking about it?

SAFR Helmet Covers: In 2020, almost a decade after Guardian Caps were invented, a company called SAFR was started in Pennsylvania that also aimed to reduce concussions for football players.

The only difference was, instead of doing it with bulky, squishy padding they wanted to make their helmet cover as discrete as possible. To do this, SAFR uses a denser, firmer polyurethane foam that attaches to a player’s helmet with metal hooks.

The rigid design allows it to absorb more energy from hits, similar to an airbag, and unlike a Guardian Cap, it’s designed to be almost unrecognizable from a normal helmet.

SAFR Claims: However, the most impressive part of SAFR helmet add-ons is the fact that they claim to reduce the risk of concussions by over 90%.

So if the SAFR really is that much safer, why aren’t football players at every level wearing one?

The Science: To answer that, I looked at the Virginia Tech study that the company’s CEO cited in a recent interview, and that study found that SAFR helmets actually only reduced concussion risk by 52%.

Now, to be fair, that is more than the 22% that Guardian XT Caps were recorded at, but when you also take into account Guardian NXT Caps, the model all the pros wear, the concussion risk dropped by 64%.

But that’s not all.

Buy in Bulk: Unlike Guardian Caps, which are sold individually online in both the XT and NXT models, you can only buy SAFR helmet covers in bulk for an entire team.

As of right now, it seems like a few colleges, including Virginia Tech and NC State, are using them in practice, so it might be a while before we see these things become as widely adopted as Guardian Caps.

🏆 Winner’s Circle

This thousand-dollar smartwatch could solve one of football’s oldest problems. So why is nobody talking about it?

Play Calling, Revolutionized: For as long as football has been played, teams have struggled to relay plays from the sideline to the field without the other team trying to steal them.

And while helmet technology has allowed teams at the professional, and even recently, the college level to send plays in via headsets, there has still never been an upgrade to the old-fashioned play call sheet and wristband… Until now.

Smart Watches: A year after Michigan got caught stealing opponents’ signs, the NCAA quietly began testing an alternative to helmet communications where coaches can instantly send plays from a tablet via a 5G cellular connection to a smartwatch on the field.

Communication is completely encrypted, and the wearable devices are layered with protective padding and a four-way privacy screen so that only players looking directly at the watch face can see the play call.

Cheaper & Better: Now, the reason you probably haven’t heard about this experiment is because the NCAA just rolled it out this year at the DIII level, with the seven schools in the Liberty League.

GoRoute provided each school with ten smartwatches and two tablets for a package that the company’s CEO says could range between $5,000 and $10,000.

While that might sound like a lot for some smartwatches, it’s also worth noting that FBS teams spent upwards of $100,000 to set up helmet headsets this year.

Not to mention that while the NCAA only allows one helmet headset per side of the ball, they’re currently testing the use of up to three smartwatches per side.

And while this was only the first year these watches were used in college football, teams like Alabama and Auburn already use them in practice to better communicate plays to all players on the field.

So it might not be long before we start seeing these things every Saturday.

⏱ In Other News

• Do Guardian Caps Actually Work?

• Don’t show this to Lions fans.

• My new favorite artist.

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👋 You likely saw the exchange below between Adam Schefter and Fox Sports radio host/UWGB Head Coach Doug Gottlieb.

But what you probably didn’t catch was the press conference Doug did a few days later, in which he referred to Michigan Tech (a DII school) as “Nobody U.” The DI UWGB Phoenix went on to lose that game, but the clip lives on:

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And to tie a nice bow on this whole story, if you scroll back on Doug’s Twitter to December 3rd of this year, you’ll see he posted this graphic:

Might be time to actually start working again, Dougy.