Suspense-Optimal College Football Playoffs

Abstract

US college football's traditional bowl system, and lack of a postseason playoff tournament, has been controversial for years. The conventional wisdom is that a playoff would be a more fair way to determine the national champion, and more fun for fans to watch. The colleges finally agreed to begin a playoff in the 2014-15 season, but with just four teams, and speculation continues that more teams will be added soon. A subtle downside to adding playoff teams is that it reduces the significance of regular season games. We use the framework of Ely, Frankel and Kamenica (2012) to directly estimate the utility fans would get from this significance, i.e., utility from suspense, under a range of playoff scenarios. Our results consistently indicate that playoff expansion causes a loss in regular season suspense utility greater than the gain in the postseason, implying the traditional bowl system (two team playoff) is suspense-optimal. We analyze and discuss implications for TV viewership and other contexts.

Keywords: College football, playoffs, bowls, uncertainty of outcome, suspense, surprise

JEL Classification: D82, D83, L83