"I feel like Oppenheimer": Josh Pate reacts to his own take on automatic bids in CFB

The possible changes for the future of the College Football Playoff have all sorts of chaotic reactions. CBS Sports analyst Josh Pate has given his takes accordingly.

On Friday, Pate seemed to have surprised himself while talking about the consequences of the possible changes to the playoff format. He gave credit to fellow insiders Andy Staples and Ari Wasserman.

“I hate @Andy_Staples & @AriWasserman for taking me to this place mentally. I feel like Oppenheimer,” Josh Pate said.

In the clip Pate was referring to, he talked about the possibility of conferences having a a sort of internal ranking system that would allow them to determine the automatic qualifiers by a conference ranking rather than only using record.

Among the points he was making, the insider mentioned that having a ranking independent of conference record would still give non-conference games their importance and serve as a way to balance the schedule. That would prevent a team having an easier list of opponents from advancing over one that may be better but faced a tougher conference schedule.

“What did we just do there?," Pate said. "We maintained the value of put of conference games, cause you better go trying to win them or you are going to get punished for them at the hands of tour conference committee.

"Number two, I made sure that there is a mechanism that accounts for the radical imbalance of conference scheduling because of how big the conferences are.

"And number three, for those of you out there that actually love the subjectivity, and you love the chaos and the debate from the committee every week, well I just enhanced it tenfold because now you got it in every conference,” Josh Pate added.

Until there's a system in place, it appears that there will be several theories still to come.

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Why Josh Pate is in favor of automatic qualifiers

While the CBS insider has mentioned that he’d prefer a CFP contraction rather than expansion, given the current status of the college football world, he considers that unlikely. So, with the continued expansion of the format, Pate prefers automatic qualifiers over just taking the CFP rankings top teams.

Scheduling seems to be among the main reasons for that change. Having an auto bid format could make up for a more solid regular season.

“If you go for just the top 14 and you seed it straight, the SEC is not going to expand to nine conference games… also if you just do the straight seeding and you don’t give the SEC or the Big Ten the automatic qualifier spots, the put of conference schedules are never going to get beefed up to the degree that they will get beefed up if we have the auto bid format,” Josh Pate said (5:12).

To Pate’s point, different sources have reported the SEC and Big Ten have been in talks to come up with an agreement to play more non conference games between their teams. That would allow more big time programs to face off against each other in the regular season.