Heck no to a separate Group of 6 playoff*

On3's Brett McMurphy and Pete Nakos contacted all 70 non-power head coaches and asked whether the Group of 6 should have its own playoff.

The answer to that question should be not just no, but heck no — to every finger-wagging Power 4 apologist who would try to convince the Group of 6 to accept a walled-off postseason by determining for these programs their own ambition and fate. A separate G6 playoff that trades away access to the College Football Playoff is not a creative solution. It is a surrender dressed up as progress.

And the G6 coaches buying this argument are buying a bad-faith one. Two-thirds of the Power 4 is not remotely competing for a national championship either. Group of 6 teams are 3-75 against the Power 4 this season in 78 games — a record cited as evidence the G6 cannot compete. But almost every one of those games was played on a Power 4 home field, with the scheduling power and opponent selectiveness controlled entirely by the Power 4. Group of 6 teams did not invent getting blown out in the College Football Playoff — the biggest blowouts in CFP history have been Power 4 against Power 4. Accepting a walled-off postseason removes any possibility of upward mobility or building a program through sustained success. It is buying second-class citizenship for the comfort of retaining your job — a job most of these coaches would leave in a heartbeat for a bigger paycheck at a Power 4 program.

But the question McMurphy actually asked — the one On3 did not convey in the tweet announcing the story — came with an asterisk. And the asterisk changes everything.

The question was whether coaches would favor a separate G6 playoff if the Group of 6 retained at least one guaranteed spot in the 24-team College Football Playoff. That produced a very different response.

Nine coaches had no opinion or declined to answer. Of the remaining 61, 40 said yes and 21 said no. A majority of coaches in every conference favored the idea. The coaches were promised anonymity.

"There's no ability for any of us to realistically win the national title," a coach in favor of a separate playoff told On3. "That's the truth. As a competitor I hate to admit that, I really do. But that's the truth. Everyone knows that. Anyone who says a G6 team can win a national title in today's transfer portal, NIL environment is delusional. Having the ability to play for a Group of Six championship compared with some obscure bowl trip is the next best thing for us."

A coach on the other side rejected the premise: "I'll be honest, I am about as anti-G6 playoff as I can be. This is just the competitor in me and how I've been wired. We want a shot at it all. If we don't get it, that's on us to be better."

Both positions are honest. The difference between them comes down to what the G6 does with the 60-plus teams that do not make the College Football Playoff — and whether the current postseason structure serves any of them.

The bowl system that has governed college football's postseason for decades is running out of runway.

McMurphy reported on Oct. 21 that eight bowl directors and Bowl Season executive director Nick Carparelli met in Irving, Texas to discuss what comes next. One director described it to On3 as a meeting convened "because we don't want to be the band members playing on the deck as the ship sinks."

The 24-team College Football Playoff is expected to begin in 2027. The Power Four conference champions and the highest-ranked Group of 6 team receive automatic bids, with the remaining 19 spots filled by the next-highest-ranked teams. That expansion absorbs the vast majority of Power 4 teams worth watching in December.

McMurphy's numbers frame the problem: last season, only 21 Power 4 bowl-eligible teams would have been left out of a 24-team playoff. Over the past five seasons, the average was 23. Roughly nine finished 6-6, leaving about a dozen non-playoff Power 4 teams with winning records. How many of those teams would want to play a postseason exhibition game after missing a 24-team field? Notre Dame already answered that question last year by opting out of the Pop-Tarts Bowl.

The current system has 16 or 17 bowls with Power 4-vs.-Power 4 matchups. Under the "best of the rest" format that has been discussed among conference officials, sources told McMurphy, that number drops to roughly six.

"The expanded College Football Playoff is killing the bowl system," a bowl director told On3. "The same bowl system that annually paid these conferences millions of dollars as long as anyone can remember."

The Power 4 bowls are in crisis. The G6 bowls are in a different position — and the reason has everything to do with how they were created.

The power conferences had the bowl inventory locked up for decades. The non-power leagues were not separated from that system. They were never in it.

The G6 built its own postseason from scratch, in partnership with ESPN. ESPN wanted programming on weeknight windows in December. The non-power conferences needed somewhere to play after the regular season. The result was a generation of bowl games — the Boca Ratons, the Frisco Bowls, the 68 Ventures — created specifically for G6 teams and broadcast specifically on G6-friendly windows.

The current tie-in structure makes the separation visible. Of 35 bowl games on the schedule, 15 carry exclusively Power 4-vs.-Power 4 conference agreements. Thirteen carry exclusively G6-vs.-G6 agreements. Only four bowls — the Fenway Bowl (ACC vs. American), the Military Bowl (ACC vs. American), the TransPerfect San Juan Bowl (Sun Belt vs. ACC) and the GameAbove Sports Bowl (Big Ten vs. MAC) — guarantee a G6 team will face a Power 4 opponent by contract.

A handful of others sit in multi-conference pools where a crossover matchup is possible but not guaranteed. The Birmingham Bowl draws from the ACC, the SEC and the American — meaning the bowl could select an ACC-vs.-SEC matchup and leave the American out of the game entirely. The First Responder Bowl and the Gasparilla Bowl carry similar pool structures. A G6 team appearing in those games is a possibility, not a promise.

Four guaranteed crossover matchups out of 35 bowl games. The Group of 6 has largely already created its own postseason. The only thing missing is a reason to care about it beyond a single game in a half-empty stadium on a Tuesday night.

A G6 playoff built on existing bowl infrastructure would not require new broadcast agreements, new venues or new scheduling frameworks. The 13 G6-vs.-G6 bowls are already programmed. The broadcast relationships with ESPN already exist. The conference champions are already determined. The selection mechanism — whether a committee, a ranking system or automatic bids for conference champions with at-large spots for the rest — is a solvable problem.

McMurphy laid out what an eight-team field would have looked like last season, excluding Tulane and James Madison, who qualified for the College Football Playoff. The bracket: Boise State as the Mountain West champion, Kennesaw State as the CUSA champion, Western Michigan as the MAC champion and five at-large teams — North Texas, Navy, New Mexico, UNLV and South Florida. Jacksonville State, Ohio, Toledo, Troy and San Diego State were among those in the at-large conversation.

An eight-team format would guarantee a spot for every conference champion. A four-team format would streamline the product but leave some conferences without representation. Both are viable. Both are better than sending those same teams to standalone exhibition games that draw modest television audiences and generate no cumulative narrative.

The anonymous coach who favors a G6 playoff described it to McMurphy this way: "Maybe have a small four- to six-team playoff of the other teams, and then let that game be the early game on New Year's Day. I bet you'd still get pretty good ratings if it was the championship."

Missouri's Eli Drinkwitz, who coached Appalachian State in 2019, told McMurphy the gap between the conferences justifies a separate competition. "Those teams and players put in the same amount of time and work," Drinkwitz said. "They should be rewarded with their own playoff."

Oklahoma State's Eric Morris, who spent three seasons at North Texas before this year, said he would have favored a G6 playoff even as a non-power coach. "These kids deserve an opportunity at that level to put together a playoff system and crown a champion," Morris told On3.

The opponents raise fair questions. An athletic director told McMurphy the concept amounts to "playing for second or third place" and compared it to the NIT. An industry source warned that starting a G6 playoff could accelerate the loss of CFP access — the very thing the coaches said they need to keep. And Scott Frost, who led UCF to an undefeated season and a Peach Bowl victory over Auburn in 2017, told McMurphy that beating Auburn in a New Year's Six bowl "probably meant more" than a hypothetical G6 playoff game against Memphis would have.

Those concerns deserve answers, and most of them have straightforward ones. The NIT comparison assumes a G6 playoff would feel like a consolation bracket — but the NIT does not crown a champion of a defined competitive tier. A G6 playoff would. The fear of losing CFP access is real, but the coaches who support the idea addressed it directly: the playoff works only if the automatic bid stays. And Frost's point about the Peach Bowl reflects a world where the best G6 team still had a path to a major bowl. Under a 24-team CFP, that team goes to the playoff. The G6 playoff would serve the teams below that line — the ones whose current postseason option is a Tuesday night exhibition.

In September, Diehard Sports Network proposed a more ambitious version of this restructuring — a framework called the Diehard League that included a 10-team National Division, promotion and relegation, geographic pods, a Conference Cup and pooled media rights across all six conferences. Boise State AD Jeramiah Dickey's public condition for supporting a G6 playoff — "not without a path to P4 defined or promotion/relegation" — was the foundation of that proposal.

The Diehard League was designed as a thought exercise, a way to push the conversation toward creative structural solutions. The coaches McMurphy surveyed are asking for something simpler — and the infrastructure for it already exists.

Thirteen bowl games. Existing broadcast windows. Conference champions. A bracket. A championship game. The G6 does not need to build a postseason. It needs to reorganize the one it already has. That could happen as soon as next year.

The coaches told McMurphy what they want. The bowl directors told him the current system is dying. The G6 built its own postseason over two decades in partnership with ESPN. The only step remaining is to give it stakes.

Should the Group of 6 have its own playoff? With access to the College Football Playoff preserved — yes. Reinvent the postseason to fit the era. Use the infrastructure the G6 already built. Crown a champion. Give 60-plus programs something to play for in December beyond an exhibition game in front of 12,000 people.

But under no circumstances should restructuring the G6 postseason come at the cost of relinquishing access to the College Football Playoff. The automatic bid is not a bargaining chip. It is the floor. Any attempt to remove it — by the Power 4 conferences, by the CFP management committee, by anyone — should be met with every legal instrument available, up to and including the Supreme Court of the United States. The Group of 6 earned its seat. It does not give it back. In fact, it should be fighting for more than one.