With profound change to the playoff seemingly inevitable, our friends at The Athletic are exploring one of the drivers of increasing the field to 12 teams.

The concentration of championships and playoff trips among a small cluster of elite teams has brought a series of articles under the tag "Parity Panic."

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National writer Nichole Auerbach wrote a story last week on how the immense focus on the playoff shows up on television, and how broadcasters are trying to "fix it" with fewer mentions of it.

The leading example of this alleged problem came on ESPN's College GameDay broadcast last Dec. 5. The fact that ESPN chose to originate its show from Myrtle Beach, home of Coastal Carolina, would seem to be a fairly resounding indicator that the four-letter network is interested in showcasing more than just the four-team playoff.

But Auerbach found that the three-hour show featured 45 minutes of talk about the CFP, and that there were 27 mentions of the word "playoff."

"Only the championship weekend edition of GameDay on Dec. 19 had more playoff mentions (35)," she wrote.