Every other college division seems to manage it okay. No reason why division 1A can’t.
Pro sports have playoffs and sometimes teams with better records are left out due to which division or conference they are in. For example a NFC team at 9-7 might stay home while an AFC team at 8-8 plays on. That’s just the way the system works and nobody complains much about those cases.
The naysayers keep saying that we need a playoff. My biggest contention is that there is a playoff. A two team playoff.
And where are going to play all these games in a 16 team format? If you notice, there are a lot of empty seats in basketball regional finals, a lot of empty seats. Are you going to play these games at home stadiums? Yep lets all go to Madison Wisconsin in the middle of winter to play a game in sub-freezing temperature. And make fans pay $150 ticket to sit on out in snow. And then do it again the next week.
Oh, lets go to warm weather sites? So the Wisconsin faithful have to take time off work to go to their game. during the Holidays?
Personally I think the system is just fine.
I’ve decided that the BCS is something we’re going to have to live with until 11-0 independent University of Notre Dame loses a shot at the BCS Championship because they’re not in one of the cartel conferences. Then we’ll get a playoff. It might happen in my lifetime. Maybe.
Maybe we should start referring to those conferences as “Big Football”.
Do you know when the NFL playoffs are?
Nobody minds that because the qualifications are understood in advance. When qualifications are voted on and recomputed every week based on perceptions of performance and ever-variable things like strength-of-schedule it’s impossible for a team to know where they stand from week to week.
Yep. But that’s a lot different than having an undefeated team left out of the mix.
Just like in pro sports , play the first few rounds at home. If it’s cold, tough - pro guys play in the cold. Warm weather only for the last game.
And there does not need to be voting every week , they don’t do that in basketball.
BTW, Notre Dame is part of the BCS system now, they have been to BCS games.
That’s because a 9-7 team is never going to win a championship. If you can’t even be the sixth best team in your conference, you don’t have much room to complain that you weren’t given a chance.
If the NFL only took the #1 ranked team from each conference to play in the Superbowl, you’d better believe that there would be a lot of complaining about the system.
In recent years 2 wild card teams have won the Super Bowl, Steelers and Giants.
Yep, NFLers are payed handsomely too.
The lower levels of NCAA FB have playoffs potentially in cold weather. (FCS, II and III) They even play some night games in December in cold climate areas.
I repeat: when they get jobbed out of the National Championship Game because they are not a member of a cartel conference the BCS will die right then and there. Nobody cares when it happens to Boise State or TCU because they play in “weak” conferences and have small fan bases. Try that crap on Notre Dame and it ends right then and there.
Your point is that people wouldn’t show up. Want me to quote it for you?
And in fact, a more accurate analogy would be if the NFL named two divisions the “Super Bowl Divisions”, and then made it almost impossible for any team from the rest of the league to even play in a Super Bowl, regardless of their records.
This is the issue, to me. How do you determine “plausible”? There’s a sense of “entitlement creep” with all the talk about how playoffs would be set up.
Think back to the 1970s or so, when all we had were the AP and UPI polls. Occasionally those two polls would name different teams as the national champion. This often caused concern, caterwauling and discussion about how nice it would be to pit those teams together.
Then recall 2004, when undefeated Oklahoma and USC played in the BCS championship game, while undefeated Auburn got left out. Now it’s three teams that claimed a legitimate shot at playing for the title.
Nowadays … sixteen? Thirty-two? Seriously, how many teams legitimately could be considered to have a shot at the ***best ***of the year, each year? Certainly not sixteen. I personally would say seven is too many. I could live with a six-team playoff, although that entails byes for the top two teams and a three-week playoff.
The undefeated teams ought to have a shot, I concur with that. How many years have there been more than four undefeated 1-A teams at the end of the season? It does happen, I admit, but not often. This is why (again, in my opinion) we should go with a Plus-One system, essentially a four-team playoff, and leave it at that.
You wouldn’t even have to change the scheduling or the bowl system as it stands today. Your top four contenders play in two of the New Years Day bowl games … the winners play a week later in the Championship game. Easy as pie. Will the fifth/sixth/seventh place teams wail and complain? Surely they will. Will they have a good argument that they deserve a shot at the national title? Occasionally, sure. But since apparently the only sure-fire fair way to determine a true champion is a 120-team round-robin tournament … I would be thrilled and happy with the Plus-One every single year.
Your mileage my vary, but that’s what I think.
There are already college football playoffs. They’ve been doing it every year for ages, with no problems. Here are the brackets from last year:
Division I:
Division II:
Division III:
Why is it easily run and uncontroversial in the other divisions, but undoable for division 1A?
I think it is unreasonable to expect fans to travel hundreds if not thousands of miles, unplanned, pay hundreds of dollars for tickets and make them sit in potentially horrible weather. Snow, rain, cold. these games potentially can be in Madison, Ann Arbor, South Bend, Boston, Columbus, Lincoln. Not normally winter vacation spots.
The players play 12-13 games per year, unpaid, and a 16 team playoff is asking about 160 of them to play four more games (in a 16-team playoff). Unpaid. The loyal fans would have to invest thousands of dollars to attend and watch all four of those games.
My biggest point is that a bigger playoff system is not going to please everyone. teams are going to be left out.
the NFL playoffs are after the Holiday season, college playoffs would be held right in the middle of the holidays.
IMO, the system is just fine the way it is. I am not saying it is fair to a team like TCU but no one said it has to be fair. TCU will be rewarded with a nice trip to Miami, or New Orleans, or Phoenix.
Why is it that most people just want to talk about problems with a playoff and not talk about why the BCS is a good system? The answer is pretty obvious.
Nitpick, but I wouldn’t just call it “Division I”. It’s the division formerly known as I-AA, now known as the “Football Championship Subdivision.” If you refer to something as “D-1” it’s understood to mean what is now called the “Football Bowl Subdivision.”