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Washington's Jedd Fisch proposes Power Four round-robin to enhance regular season

Byington mugby: Alex Byington05/22/26_AlexByington

Among the more prominent complaints among opponents of the Big Ten’s 24-team College Football Playoff proposal is the expectation it will devalue college football’s regular season. Last week, ESPN’s Paul Finebaum and Mike Greenberg railed against the idea during multiple Get Up segments after the ACC and Big 12 formally backed doubling the current 12-team format.

“Twenty-four is the worst possibility in the history of this game. Why? Because it is going to devalue, dilute, and perhaps destroy the greatest football season of them all — that’s the regular season in college football,” Finebaum said on May 14th’s Get Up. “The big games at the end of the regular season are going to be meaningless.”

The day before, Greenberg proposed the possibility Michigan and Ohio State could be inclined to rest starters in The Game, among the most fierce of college football’s annual rivalry games, if both were already assured Playoff spots in a 24-team field ahead of their usually contentious regular-season finale.

And while those remain serious concerns, Washington head coach Jedd Fisch has an interesting idea that he believes could help alleviate any potential negative impact on the regular season — have each Power Four team play a representative from the other three leagues during the first three weeks of the season.

“I believe, not only should it be a 24-team Playoff, but I believe Week 1 should be Big Ten vs. Big 12, SEC vs. ACC. Week 2 should be Big Ten vs. SEC, ACC vs. Big 12. And then Week 3 should be Big Ten vs. ACC, SEC vs. Big 12,” Fisch said Friday on SiriusXM. “I think you should play the three Power Four conferences and then you should play nine Big Ten games, and if you want to schedule somebody else, you schedule them in the preseason.”

Fisch’s proposal would effectively force the Power Four conferences to come together and create a joint scheduling model similar to how the leagues developed college basketball’s ACC-Big Ten and Big 12-SEC challenges before they ended in 2022 with the advent of the ACC-SEC Challenge as shepherded by ESPN. Of course, since the Power Four leagues have varying number of member teams — Big Ten (18), ACC (17), Big 12 (16) and SEC (16) — it might require some finagling, or another round of conference realignment.

Still, despite the obvious complications to such an idea, Fisch believes the early-season round-robin between the Power Four conferences could also help resolve some of the annual end-of-season debate regarding which leagues are stronger and thus deserve some grace in the final CFP rankings.

“Because we need to know how good the other conferences are, so we can determine if a 9-3 Washington team should be ahead of a 10-2 team from a different (Power Four) conference,” Fisch continued. “We should be able to determine what the markers should look like, and yeah, I see no problem at all with teams that have three losses (in the Playoffs). I actually think, if you win 75% of your games in the New World Order that we’re living in, you should have a chance to go compete for a national championship.”

It’s certainly an interesting proposal, even if it’d ultimately require complete coordination between college football’s real power brokers — the television networks, specifically ESPN and FOX. And what’s the chance of that ever happening?