Matt Drinkall Blasts CFP Expansion as 24-Team Playoff Debate Gets Louder

Central Michigan’s coach challenges the expansion argument

Central Michigan coach Matt Drinkall became one of the loudest voices in the College Football Playoff expansion debate in October 21 coverage of his Tuesday comments. Drinkall argued that money was driving the sport’s major changes without enough consideration for its long-term health. His criticism addressed a possible move to a 24-team field and the wider direction of college football.

The tone made the comments travel, but the underlying disagreement is more substantial than whether a bigger bracket sounds exciting. Expansion changes who receives access, how the regular season is judged and how many games a championship path can require. A coach can support broader opportunity while still questioning the calendar or the incentives attached to it. Those arguments deserve to be evaluated separately.

For a program outside the biggest spending tier, postseason access is a concrete issue rather than an abstract television discussion. YouWager’s earlier Central Michigan-Ohio matchup preview is a reminder that the season also consists of ordinary conference games with their own stakes. Any expanded format has to explain how those games connect to the postseason and whether the route is meaningful for a wide range of programs.

Access, incentives and the calendar need separate answers

Drinkall’s criticism does not by itself settle whether a larger playoff would help or harm the sport. A useful assessment would compare the actual proposed rules: qualification routes, seeding, hosting, scheduling and the treatment of conference championships. Until those details are established, confident claims about every consequence go further than the available information. More entries can create more opportunity, but the design decides how that opportunity is distributed.

The sports business work at Wharton offers broader background for considering the relationship between competition and financial incentives. Here, the important distinction is between criticizing the motive and evaluating the mechanism. Television interest, campus access and player demands can all matter at once. A format should be assessed on how it balances those interests rather than on the volume of the argument surrounding it.

The same need to understand the structure appears in YouWager’s college football guide, where the setting matters before a matchup is evaluated. For the playoff debate, the next meaningful development is a concrete decision with clear rules. Drinkall supplied a forceful warning about the direction of travel. The people designing the postseason still need to show how the proposed system would work and why its consequences are acceptable.