Analysis: College Football Playoff coverage has become a race to the hottest take

There’s a moment in which every conspiracy theory breaks under its own expanding weight and becomes too stupid to invest in. Luckily for ESPN, when it comes to the College Football Playoff, we’ve arrived at this point.

The first round of this season’s playoff – brought you by ESPN! – was dominated not by the excitement of the first sport-changing opening round of the 12-team format, but by the narrative discourse … also brought to you by ESPN.

All four opening-round games landed as on-field duds, with the higher seeds blowing out the visiting teams to one degree or another. This prompted pundits with ties to the SEC – most notably those employed by ESPN’s SEC Network, a partnership between the entities – to amplify their complaints that the wrong teams made the bracket and the omission of schools such as Alabama harmed the sport’s new postseason.

The ire of the Southeastern contingent focused on 11-1 Indiana, which scored two touchdowns late in the fourth quarter of a 27-17 loss to Notre Dame on Friday night that was far more lopsided than that. Commentator Sean McDonough took the Hoosiers to task during the ESPN game broadcast, as did various “College GameDay” pundits, most with hilariously obvious biases at play (former Alabama coach Nick Saban, for example). The indignity carried through Penn State’s 38-10 blowout of SMU on Saturday, which SEC pundits argued was another missed spot to insert a member of their conference.

Of course, when SEC founding member Tennessee collapsed at Ohio State to end the first round Saturday night, no one seemed to mind. In fact, Paul Finebaum, the SEC’s official craftsman of chicken-fried agitprop, waved away the result because the Volunteers “earned” their place in the bracket. “GameDay” co-host Kirk Herbstreit lambasted Indiana but failed to acknowledge the Vols’ similarly poor performance, and he complained on various ESPN platforms that the playoff committee should ignore the influence of “fringe fans” in the next selection process.

Noncompetitive games are a staple of the College Football Playoff. The first semifinal, a hyped Rose Bowl matchup on New Year’s Day in 2015 featuring two Heisman-winning quarterbacks, ended with Marcus Mariota and Oregon beating Jameis Winston and Florida State 59-20. The following two seasons featured shutouts of programs from power leagues in the semifinals, with Alabama blanking Michigan State 38-0, in the 2015 Cotton Bowl and Clemson destroying Ohio State 31-0, in the 2016 Fiesta Bowl. By the time the four-team format ended last year, the average margin of victory in 20 semifinal games was more than 17 points.

But this year’s lack of compelling games pushed various corners of ESPN’s talent to blame the system along the lines of conference affiliation. ESPN eschews any kind of ombudsman-like public disclosure and seemingly leans into willfully ignoring its own role in creating the news it claims to objectively report on. We’re never told the difference between editorial standards on regular ESPN compared with the SEC or ACC Networks it operates, and often talent migrates among those brands. It’s confusing, either by design or the absence of forethought.

College football suffers more than any other sport. Unlike other broadcast rights agreements with the NBA or NFL, ESPN’s selective contracts with portions of the sport leave it exposed to criticism of favoritism. Imagine if the largest sports media company in the nation signed an exclusive deal to carry only AFC North games, creating more wealth for AFC North teams to build better facilities and sign players to better, richer contracts than AFC South teams. Oh, and that same media company is the largest source for news on the NFL as a whole.

When ESPN creates smart, intelligent coverage of college sports, or even hosts a more measured debate over something like first-round blowouts and SEC teams’ résumés, such as what “SportsCenter” anchor Scott Van Pelt routinely does, it earns a fraction of the attention of the bombastic takes designed to “embrace debate.”

That’s college football’s media ethics mess. But the good news, at least by gallows standards, is that ESPN’s college football business interests run wider than just the SEC. ESPN holds broadcast rights to the 12-team playoff, which, at least for the time being, should assuage college football fans’ fears that there’s an organized, companywide ESPN media conspiracy on behalf of the SEC.

That’s because the media entity attacking the credibility of the postseason format is the same one that airs it. If there were an organized coverage conspiracy, the narrative should have dramatically shifted before the first round from a debate about who made the field to the storylines inside the bracket. That never happened, and in fact ESPN personalities consistently undermined the legitimacy of the playoff, an ESPN television product.

Is there an SEC bias at play in ESPN’s coverage of college football? It seems strange to believe one couldn’t exist, given the contracts in play. But no matter how glaring that preference might be in the week-to-week coverage of the sport, ESPN is heavily invested in the success of the larger-formatted College Football Playoff. If you believe ESPN is in the tank for one business partner, it can’t simultaneously do the same thing for another.

This doesn’t mean fair play and objectivity are front of mind, it just means the most popular product they are peddling is becoming dumber. ESPN’s main content creation used to be sports news and analysis, but as the digital age created a glut of options for consumers, ESPN “evolved” by leaping headfirst into punditry. It’s a lucrative business model with cheaper overhead than live event coverage, and it’s also a breakneck race to the bottom of standards.

It’s easy to believe ESPN is orchestrating a companywide conspiracy on behalf of the SEC to better its business dealings, because the structure of college football’s business actively promotes the idea. The reality is far less compelling: Shouting the most extreme opinion in the loudest manner possible is a path to success at America’s largest sports media company.