College football needs a title-game shakeup. This almost annual deal with Alabama and Clemson is wearing thin, at least outside of Tuscaloosa and the gentle hills of northwest South Carolina.

It’s the equivalent of TV binge-watching without the ability to choose the show. It’s a remote control with one button. It’s one channel in our 1,000-channel world.

There are 129 teams in the Football Bowl Subdivision and we see, for the most part, two.

When Alabama and Clemson line up Monday at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, it will be the third time in the five seasons they’ve played in the title game. The Crimson Tide has reached the championship game four straight times. The Tigers, three of the last four. They also played each other in last year’s semifinals.

It’s not good for the sport. College football needs new blood and a fresh script.

The story lines, even as some of the players change, become thread-bare. How many ways can TV repackage the “Nick Saban is super competitive” angle? How do you reposition the “Dabo Swinney is the likable, aw-shucks guy on the other sideline” plot line?

All of it, in a nutshell, is why college basketball is built to be better. Every year.

When you have automatic and at-large berths feeding a tournament, everyone has a chance. In basketball it means Northern Iowa can stun Kansas. North Carolina State can topple Phi Slama Jama. Loyola of Chicago, with an enrollment of 11,000 or so, can make an unfathomable run to the Final Four.

In football, anyone outside the Power 5 conferences has no shot. Open it up to a bigger tournament and the door is cracked, at least a bit.

I’ve supported an eight-team format from the beginning. You can reward all the Power 5 winners with spots, designate a Group of 5 qualifier, then watch everyone else slug it out for two at-large bids. You still will end up with the big boys much of the time, but it would offer a glimmer of hope for those Central Florida or Boise State teams.

Some argue you might force a couple of teams to play another game. As San Diego State Coach Rocky Long rightly points out, they do it at every other level of football.

“Every other sport and every other division does it,” Long said. “The only one that doesn’t do it is Division I (FBS) football. So don’t give me any baloney that you can’t do it because of time restraints and stuff, because everyone else is doing it.”

Try making the argument that you care about the well-being of athletes at the FBS level when everyone else already is doing it. We care about the guys at Alabama more than we do the North Dakota State Bison? The Maine Black Bears?

“That’s what they do in a lot of states in high school football,” Long said of playing that many games. “That’s how many they play in Division II and III. And when you get to the end, there’s only two teams playing that many games.”

Some contend the money-hungry bowls would fight it. They shouldn’t. An eight-team playoff means more of those games become even bigger, with the gigantic TV paychecks that would latch onto the do-or-die stakes.

“Right now they have total control,” Long said of the Power 5s. “They have a monopoly on the resources. If they opened it up to a (bigger) tournament, they have to share their resources. There’s no legitimate argument, other than one group wants to maintain control of the majority of the resources.”

For those who insist an expansion would diminish the regular season, um, no. That simply would increase the number of games with playoff implications. In the final weeks, drama would skyrocket.

The response to all this from the Tide and Tigers: Even if things change, you still have to beat us. And they’re right.

But this is about opportunity. It’s about the kind of opportunity basketball offers in the NCAA tournament. It’s about the kind of opportunity that already exists in FCS football and at all those other levels.

It’s also about selfishness. The last time a team outside of the SEC or ACC reached the championship came five seasons ago, in the first game (Ohio State beat Oregon). Fans want a new team now and again. Fans want more playoff tension. Fans deserve another lap of games that mean more.

Increasing contenders means more chances for an Alabama or a Clemson to run into a bad matchup or a hot quarterback.

Let’s change the channel.

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