All this talk about a 24-team playoff and the Big Ten coaches lobbyig for it at their spring meetings and I just keep coming back to one thing. Gary Patterson would have hated every single second of this. The man built a program on the idea that you earn everything, that you prove it on the field, not in a committee room. He took a team that went 1-11 in 1997 and turned us into a program that went to the Rose Bowl in 2010, the old fashioned way, by winning your conference and letting the chips fall where they may.
Now we got coaches begging for more participation trophies. A 24-team playoff means half the conferences get in. It means a team that goes 7-5 can sneak in because they won their division in a down year. That is not football, that is a banquet. Coach Patterson would have told them to go earn it on the field the way we did, winning ten games in the Mountain West and then going into the Big 12 and taking down teams like Oklahoma, Texas, and Baylor when nobody gave us a chance. He built a defense that finished first in the nation multiple times without a single five-star recruit because he coached them up and demanded they earn their snaps.
I remember sitting in Amon Carter during the 2014 season when we went 12-1 and beat Ole Miss in the Peach Bowl. We did not need a 24-team playoff to validate that season. We knew what we were. Now the Big 12 is going along with this nonsense because they are scared of being left out of the money. Coach Patterson would have said play better football and stop begging for handouts. The game has lost its spine.