Pate wants it in writing, in August, before anybody's mad about anything.

The claim: if the Big Ten eats itself alive and the SEC turns into Texas-and-everybody-else, and a three-loss team ends up on the outside of the College Football Playoff, that is not broken. That is the system working exactly as designed. Pate isn't waiting for the outrage cycle to make that case. He's making it now, while — his words — he's thinking clearly.

The setup nobody's talking about yet

Start with the Big Ten, because that's where the scenario is born.

Pate isn't predicting collapse at the top. He's pointing out the schedule math sitting in plain sight. As he put it, “In the Big 10, Ohio State plays the toughest schedule out of any Big 10 team. USC's way up there. Oregon's way up there.” Translate that into consequence: the teams built to win the league are also built to beat each other up. Meanwhile Penn State and Iowa sit on the softer side of the slate. Run it forward and you get a conference title game between two one-loss teams nobody would call the best two teams in the league — while Ohio State, Oregon and Indiana are still great, still nine-and-three, and still done.

Now slide over to the SEC, where Pate's second domino falls a completely different way. Texas runs the table at 13-0, the clear number-one seed, no argument. But nobody else in the league climbs higher than nine-and-three. Two different leagues, two different mechanisms, one identical result: a pile of quality three-loss teams with nowhere to go.

That's the whole engine of the scenario. Not one fluke. Two separate structural realities colliding into the same log jam.

The case: this isn't a bug

Here's where Pate turns the corner from scenario-building to argument, and it's the part worth screenshotting.

He knows exactly what happens the moment a three-loss Georgia or a three-loss Indiana gets left home. “I want to be on record as saying that now in August when I'm thinking clearly because then it gets really hazy and everyone gets emotional.”

That's not throat-clearing. That's Pate boxing in his own future self, and everyone else's, before the emotion shows up.

His standard is blunt: three losses means you handed away control of your own fate, and a playoff that holds that line is a playoff functioning correctly. “So if you're if Indiana's on the outside looking in, if if Georgia is on the outside looking in, if you're a three loss team, man, that's just that's the brakes.”

And he's not inventing the standard out of nowhere — he's got a receipt from last season. “It happened last year to Notre Dame. It happened last year to Texas, and it should have at least to Texas.” The precedent already exists. This is Pate arguing consistency, not improvisation.

That's the kicker of the whole piece, and Pate says it straight out.

“But no matter what, if this comes to be, the answer is not, well, let's expand the playoff. That's the fix. Maybe nothing needs to be fixed.” A log jam of good three-loss teams isn't proof the format is too small. It's proof the format is doing its job — separating good from good enough.

The honest complication

Here's the tension Pate doesn't fully resolve. His own scenario has him handing out four spots before a single at-large is decided — Notre Dame, the Group of Six champion, the ACC champion, the Big 12 champion — on top of the SEC and Big Ten champs. That's most of the field determined by conference outcome, not by who's actually best. If SMU finishes 11-1 and misses the ACC crown, or BYU makes a real run in the Big 12, the sport could watch a one-loss team get squeezed by access rules in the exact season a three-loss team's absence is being defended as pure meritocracy. Pate's standard treats loss totals as gospel for excluded teams, but his own bracket math admits the format bends around conference championships first. Both things can be true — the three-loss exclusion can be fair and the access format can still be lopsided. He credits the setup without fully wrestling that contradiction to the ground.

Still, give him this: he's not hedging. He's naming the exact failure condition for his own take — a three-loss team getting left out and it somehow not being fair — and saying in advance that outcome wouldn't move him.

The standings will decide whether any of this happens. Pate already decided what he thinks about it if it does. Watch the full segment and see if the Big Ten actually starts eating itself the way the schedule says it might.