UCLA HC Bob Chesney Fully Supports Big Changes That Could Improve the CFP

Bob Chesney is fresh off taking James Madison to the College Football Playoff, and the new UCLA head coach is on board with the structural overhauls the American Football Coaches Association is pushing.

Chesney told Rich the JMU showing in the playoff did not make the case the way he wanted it to. "If we had a little bit of a better showing, we could have said something a little bit differently. It took us a half to figure out that speed and the size and the things that came with it." He is not retreating from the bigger argument, though. He believes the Cinderella moment is coming.

"It happens in basketball all the time. You watch those low seeds beat a high seed. It's going to happen at some point in football as well."

Rich pushed him on what that would actually look like. A 16 over a 1? A 12 over a 5? Chesney did not put a bracket number on it, but he was clear about the talent flow. "You look at the grouping of players that have come from that lower level, the Group of Five, and you watch them go on to the next level as they get recruited up to that level and they perform at a high level. There's a team out there or there will be a team out there that has enough caliber players to give someone a shot and possibly pull off a win." Not a deep run. One round.

The AFCA proposals Chesney is more openly enthusiastic about are the structural ones. Killing the conference championship games. Compressing the calendar. Setting a floor of no fewer than six days between games.

On the championship game, Chesney has lived the math. He played in a Sun Belt title game with JMU. There was also a year in his D3 life when his team lost a conference title game and got bumped from the playoffs while a team with a lower seed advanced because it had fewer losses. "That's how they viewed the losses. They didn't want to see too many losses on that schedule." Then the conference winner has to play one more brutal game and immediately walk into the playoffs against a team that just had a bye. That, Chesney said, is a huge advantage gap.

On the calendar compression, Rich made the point sharper. Indiana went almost a full month between playing for the Big Ten title and the Rose Bowl. Oregon did not have to play in the Big Ten title game and made it anyway. "What are we doing, right?" Chesney agreed.

The one wrinkle Chesney flagged is academic. The new schedule has to play nice with finals, with semester systems, with quarter systems. "Everybody's on different schedules. Not everybody runs a semester program." Each institution, he said, will have to figure that part out internally.

The rest of the philosophy, he told Rich, is straightforward. Keep the momentum rolling. Do not let a champion limp into the playoffs after a brutal title game. Do not let a contender sit a month in between. The coaches, in Chesney's read, are aligned on this one.