Typical responses for the anti expansion crowd. "It diminishes the regular season". Yet I have never seen a single argument that holds water that is a true statement.
1. Every game still matters. Still need to win your conference to be in for sure.
2. Every game matters. Still want a home seed and the for sure sell out crowd (and money) you will get.
3. It brings way more fans into the picture. Fans that right now have zero skin in the game since they know they is no chance in hell their team is every sniffing the playoffs.
So ok please give me a factual basis for why a 16 team playoffs kills the regular season. Oh and don't give me the you can't lose a game argument. Three of the top four in the ESPN rankings as of today have a loss and Auburn has two!
I'm not sure how typical one of my points is, which is that we shouldn't have more games that bring in more revenue that the players don't see a cut of while they are damaging their brains. But onto your points....
As for every game still mattering, well they wouldn't nearly as much as they do now. That Bama-Auburn game would not have meant nearly as much if there were a 16 team playoff. Depending on how the teams are chosen, both teams would have likely been safe in a 16 team playoff, now that game was do or die for Auburn and may turn out that way for Alabama as well. The big games that people are looking forward to next weekend wouldn't mean as much either as the loser of many of those games would still be able to compete in the playoffs. Right now, whether or not a game truly does break a contenders season, a loss can genuinely feel that way in the moment. But then all these other games start to matter for those 1-2 loss teams that still have some hope.
Now for bringing more fans into the picture, you have a point and I'll argue against myself for a bit here. As much as people want to rave about college football, the vast majority of teams have no chance at the playoffs, the vast majority of games are meaningless to the playoff picture other than to make contenders schedules look better or worse, and even the majority of games featuring the playoff contenders are trash. So yeah, if you expand to 16, you bring more fanbases into the picture, which is a positive.
However, I go back to what I said in my prior post, which is that I don't think the teams after 8 or so would really have any chance of winning the championship anyway. It can still be fun for those teams and their fanbases though, but I guess the bowls are too. Ultimately for me, that point, while having merit, doesn't outweigh the diminished luster of the really big games / each week mattering to the point of playoff chances for these contenders, and the point I led this post with (I know not everyone cares about that ethical argument though).