CFB analyst Josh Pate wants 'maximum focus' on conference championships

Changes could be coming to college football as soon as the 2025 season as 10 FBS conferences and Notre Dame are set to meet to discuss the future of the College Football Playoff. Josh Pate joined TexAgs Live as the SEC and Big Ten are expected to ask about a change of seeding.

Key notes from Josh Pate interview

• You want to mix in two legs per week. I believe in legs, chest, arms, legs, back and shoulders. Mix in a rest day, and then you start it all over again. I've never been a huge believer in mixing cardio in. And then you eat like 19 meals a day unless you have an extremely slow metabolism. If it tastes good, I'm going to go for it.
   
• I think we are going to know something about what is going to happen in the 2025 season. I'll be pleasantly surprised if they do go straight seeding this year.
   
• Here's the hard part: A lot of people thought Arizona State and Boise State having bids is messed up. The Big Ten and the SEC want to get rid of the auto bids, but it's not that easy. The next layer is that nobody is tasked with looking out for the best interest of college football. It's still just people looking out for the best interest of their conference. The Mountain West commissioner would look at it and say that it doesn't make a lot of sense for Boise to have a bye, but he isn’t going to vote for the commonsense approach because it takes away our leverage. The only way it gets signed off, which requires every commissioner to sign off, is to trade on something down the road or hold something else over their heads.
   
• There's a lot of convention that never gets tested, a lot of language in contracts that remains impenetrable because it never gets tested. When I was negotiating with CBS, there were things that I was interested in negotiating that my peers thought were nonstarters. Guess what? They were possible all along. Similarly, in college athletics, there are accepted norms that aren't tested. Not only should the SEC and Big Ten test those theories, but they can test it with the biggest foot in the room.
   
• Generally, I am against the auto bids. The regular season is losing portions of its meaning, so I start asking myself how we preserve this. I care about the regular season more than the playoffs. How do I preserve Saturdays in the fall? The only way to do that is the auto bid system. With 14 teams already in most years, the top four SEC teams and top four Big Ten teams will be good enough to be considered.
   
• In the aggregate, those four seats at the table make it so that nobody has to wonder what the playoff rankings are. No one has to focus on whether you are in or out. You are focused on your league race. I want maximum focus on the Big Ten championship race, the ACC, the SEC, etc. You had guys like Lane Kiffin wondering if it was worth it to play in conference games, and I'm not knocking it. Out of the remaining possibilities, I think the auto-bid is best for business.
   
• You can take Oklahoma and Texas. The way I break down the strength of the schedule is to put teams into eight tiers. Oklahoma plays nine teams in tier one or two, and Texas isn't even close. I'm supposed to pretend we are playing the same sport? I can't solely value records.
   
• The retort to that is that wins and losses don't matter, but that is not what I am saying. In the NFL, you are what your record says you are because the record disparity is minute. In college football, the differences are insane.
   
• I think with the 16-team format, is that the one where there would be no first-round byes? I think some people think it's best with no byes. I think we are circling around a 14-seed playoff format. Out of the two that I looked at, that's what I preferred. I wouldn't be shocked if we found out that there was some secret format that they were working on, so I leave room for that.
   
• These are the people who brought you such things, like expanding the basketball NCAA Tournament. I was at dinner last night with someone who is kind of in the room making decisions on these things, and not everyone in the room cares about college athletics. These are people counting beans and looking at college football as an inanimate object that is merely an asset under the umbrella. It doesn't matter to them, but it matters to a lot of us. They would see the blowback of a play-in game, but they don’t understand it because it makes them more money.
   
• USC is going to take a while for it to take root, but it may. Lincoln Riley should have hired the right defensive staff, but the staff he has now is excellent. It took him two years to bring them in, which set them back. The thing about USC is it is a multi-year rebuild on that side of the ball. They also didn’t get ahead of the curve on NIL, which is mind-boggling.
   
• When you first heard about NIL and the transfer portal, you probably thought that USC was going to be a runaway freight train. They just weren’t. Only recently have they made the right hires, like their GM from Notre Dame. You have a couple of huge aspects that are not being put in place, which means that Riley has been there for four years, and we are talking about it like it's a year one.
   
• I don't think Lincoln Riley forgot how to win. I think he was probably wearing four hats, and now he has been able to take some off and put them on the right heads.
   
• Spring games matter. Mike Elko's ability to effectively win in the fall is not dependent on a spring game, but the bottom line is it is a great fan experience. People watch football because people like football. At the very core, you are in the entertainment business, you are just running a football team in it.
   
• Everybody watches their team in the spring because people can afford the experience in the spring. It is an optimism-based climate, and it is a shame that if you make the move and don't replace it, you piss on the fan experience. You are here to make people happy as you win. You can't sacrifice one to help the other. People who think that way don't realize that it is not just limited to that.