This week’s CFP bracket shook up the usual order. For the first time in years, two “Group-of-Five” teams, JMU and Tulane, earned playoff berths. Their inclusion wasn’t some rogue decision. It was baked into the rules. Under the current 12-team CFP format, the five highest-ranked conference champions qualify automatically and this year, that included the top Group-of-Five champions. 

But instead of celebrating that moment as a victory for par­­ity and access, many pundits, coaches, and even network insiders instantly shifted to outrage. 

The “Whenever It Doesn’t Benefit Us” Problem

When the CFP format was drawn up and heavily influenced by Power-4 conference commissioners and media partners like ESPN, one could argue they signed off on a structure designed to preserve their power: automatic bids to big conference champs, limited field size, at-large spots determined by committees that tend to favor brand-name programs. That framework helped keep the big brands dominant. 

Yet now, when that structure happens to elevate non-traditional names, the same folks denouncing the result are the ones who quietly accepted the very rules that allowed it.

It’s almost as if the outrage isn’t about fairness at all. It’s about optics, money, and what sells good television. Once the rules benefit them, silence and smiles. Once the underdogs get in, suddenly it’s “a dilution,” “a mistake,” “a charity case.”

The Kill-the-Rules When They Hurt You Mentality

Consider what analysts on the airwaves have said. Following the bracket reveal, one analyst from ESPN didn’t even sugarcoat it: “No one in America aside from JMU or Tulane thinks that JMU or Tulane can win a championship this year,” he said. “They’re in it because we had to include them based on the parameters we were given.” 

That kind of language isn’t just insulting, it also reveals a deeper hypocrisy. The “parameters” that allow small or rising programs a path to the playoffs were established precisely so that there would be a path. And when that path is used and leads to real, tangible outcomes, we get this kind of public lamentation.

This is the same phenomenon whenever conference realignment, playoff expansion, or access reforms come up. The moment the system starts working for someone other than the traditional powers (even if it’s exactly how it was designed) these gatekeepers suddenly become defenders of “tradition,” “quality,” and “the integrity of the sport.”

Expansion Is Coming — and That’s What Should Scare the Power 4

What’s especially rich is that the same Power 4 commissioners who now complain about Group-of-Five access are simultaneously discussing expansion: there’s talk about 14-team, 16-team, or even larger CFP formats. 

If and when that expansion happens, those commissioners who tried to block or deride JMU and Tulane’s inclusion today will find themselves upended by their own ambition. Suddenly, there’ll be more spots and likely more teams outside the traditional power structure. The “we can’t let them in” rhetoric will collide with “we need more games, more TV rights, more exposure, more money.”

If history is any guide, once the cash flow increases, so will the willingness to bend the rules again until they need them to preserve their dominance.

The Real Joke… And It’s On Them

The biggest absurdity isn’t that JMU or Tulane made the CFP. The joke is that ESPN and the Power 4 architects of this structure are complaining only after all the fine print was drawn to benefit exactly their favored few.

They wrote those rules. They passed those models. They accepted, albeit silently, that the occasional “Group-of-Five dark horse” might one day win big. But when that day came, they recoiled and declared it wrong.

If the aim was to make the CFP a meritocracy to give every conference a shot, then good. JMU and Tulane deserved their spots this year. If the aim was to protect brand names and TV ratings, then perhaps they shouldn’t have built a system that allowed “surprises.”

And now that surprise has arrived. The hypocrisy is palpable.

In the end, as long as these voices are the same ones who drafted the rules, their outrage reveals only one thing: they’re only happy when “the rules” benefit them.