Hei Lun of Begging to Differ explains why we won’t be seeing a playoff in college football (at least, not one bigger than the “plus-one” four-team format) any time soon. But he omits one other aspect of the “money” side of the equation: the way that bowl revenues are divvied up.

The teams (except independents, which today means—in practice—Notre Dame) don’t keep all of the payout from a bowl appearance; instead, they get about half, and the rest is divided equally around their conference, with perhaps a share also going to the league office. So every SEC school will get about a million dollars in shared bowl revenue this winter, in addition to any bowl payout shares (Auburn will get the biggest chunk of change, while every school will at least break even—travel expenses for the team and the band come out of the payout, obviously, so the headline payout number can be misleading at smaller bowls). In a playoff, these guaranteed revenues would essentially go away for conferences that don’t get anyone in the bracket—and the big schools depend on this money to fund their “non-revenue” sports (i.e. the sports other than football, men’s basketball, and [depending on the school] women’s basketball), and, by extension, deter Title IX lawsuits.

More importantly for this equation, any playoff would almost certainly fall under NCAA auspices and probably either give every playoff participant a slice of the pie (as outlined above) or every I-A school a slice of the pie; either option would essentially take money—and control—from the 5½ major conferences. And, given that a slight majority of I-A programs are in the majors (a figure likely to increase once the new I-A actual attendence requirements start to erode the Sun Belt and other minors), the status quo works just fine for a majority of the programs out there.