While we are all but done with college football in the present day, we still harken back to our roots, and this whole enterprise was somewhat aimed toward criticizing now-Mississippi State Bulldogs Head Coach Mike Leach—hence the firemikeleach.com redirect. But we’re also objective journalists and have been for 30 years now, so we give credit where it is due.

And Leach has nailed it on the head, as the sport spirals out of control with now-open bribery and corruption. The sport will no longer be recognizable in the 2021 season and beyond, as teams outbid others to buy the best players through endorsement deals and hitherto forbidden riches at the amateur level of football.

So, you might as well open up the playoff system to 64 teams, just like NCAA basketball did back in the mid-1980s. This has been our argument for years, even if we settled for projecting 16 teams in a hypothetical scenario. While we will never cover present-day college football like we used to, this makes the most sense going forward now into the death spiral of the sport.

Too many teams already made bowl games, so why not just let them play out a regular tournament? Makes perfect sense to us if they’re going to be paid professionals now, and we can drop the pretense of “student” concerns about playing through the winter/holiday break or traveling during “finals week” … blah blah blah. Those were always open lies, and now they’re just going to be bad lies.

Bring it on. Nothing to be afraid of, anyway, as there will be plenty of money to go around now—unless more fans take the attitude that buying a mythical national championship in football is not really what they care about. We suspect college football will not last the decade, in truth; thus, they might as well go all in now before it’s too late.