I enjoy football, and I like Div. 1A College football over the NFL. Every year the sports writers and talk sports radio people clamor for a playoff system to decide who is the true national champion of the game, instead of the BCS and the current bowl system.
My question is, how would this be workable and viable? Teams now play 13 games, and three conferences now have a conference championship, which pushes the total to 14 games. Add that there is about 117 teams in Div iA who play the game, how would they pick 4, 8, or 16 teams for a playoff and who would be left out. If they are 16 teams picked, this means that these teams would have to play up to 4 more games to decide a champion. The NFL uses goofy mathmatical formulas to pick playoff teams and they are only 32 of these teams now (for example the Jets got in with an 8-8 record while the 49ers were out with a respectable 10-6 record.)
My alma mater was only 6-6 this year and they got into a small bowl (they won!), but still. Some would say that basketball has a playoff in March, but these 64 teams have to win 6 games to get the national championship and no insult to hoopsters, but football is a far but more lethal and tiring game. Besides, these are not professional athletes (yet).
I would personally like to see the college football championship played on Saturday, the day before the Super Bowl.
Well…first of all there needs to be a FAIR judge…preferably a football guru who would know this sort of stuff. Secondly: is this question really for the team or your team? (lol)
Sure a major college football playoff could be done, assuming you could convince the big football conferences (Big 10, Big 12, Big East, SEC, Pac-10, ACC and Notre Dame) to share the revenue generated by the tournament with the other conferences (C-USA, WAC, Mountain West, MAC, Big West) and if you were willing to dispose of the bowls all together. As it stands now in the BSC System, the big bowls and the revenue they generate all go to the big schools. There is no way in hell any team from C-USA is ever going to have a chance to play in a high dollar payoff BSC Bowl (Rose Bowl, Sugar Bowl, Fiesta Bowl or Orange Bowl) unless it goes undefeated, and even then it would still stand the chance of being shunned, while an ACC team like Florida State can skate into a BCS bowl with 4 losses. Contrast this with the NCAA hoops tournament, where the big schools and conferences still have decided advantages (ie getting 5-6 teams into the tournament in contrast to smaller conferences which are lucky to get one team in), but where smaller schools at least get a chance to win on the court and occasionally come through (ie Gonzaga and Kent State).
The bowl system cannot be used as part of a football playoff just because a schools’ fans cannot afford the time or money to travel so much. It is one thing to go to the final 4 in basketball, which is all in one site over a long weekend, and quite another to travel to 3 different far flung sites over 3 weekends as part of a football playoff. The smaller college divisions have successful playoffs, but they play the first and second round games on campus sites, so the home team (ie higher seed) gets its home fans at the game. There is no way that enough people can afford to travel to a game on short notice at 3 different warm weather sites in 3 weeks, and don’t tell me about how well fans of Notre Dame or Nebraska or Ohio State “travel” because they the exception and not the rule.