I don’t follow college ball, just NFL, and when I’m jonesing for football, Arena. Probably the main reason I don’t follow college ball is because my college didn’t have a team.
The second reason, and why I don’t pick up on some other college I like, is the “whacky” college system. I have tried to watch the sports guys on TV debating the “rankings” and it’s a big turn off for me to think the teams are ranked by some kind of “poll” based upon which powerhouse team clobbered some crap team by 70 points as opposed to only 65 points.
The sportscasters hem and haw and go on and on about what an outrage it is to have so-and-so ranked above such-and-such every damn week. It’s almost like a soap opera instead of sport in this regard.
Find some objective measure of success, and I might be interested. Football shouldn’t be a judged competition.
The NFL system isn’t perfect with it’s division and conference set-up defining the playoff seeding. Yes, people gripe about NFL playoff seeding and speculate as to which NFL team is better in light of apparently deceptive win-loss records and strength of opponents, but the NFL system seems a lot less arbitrary, subjective, and annoying than college.
I’ve tried to get into college football, but all the whacky rankings, polls, and bowls suck, IMHO. However, I’m sure others will say I “just don’t get it.” And that’s ok.
See, it works well for everyone. NFL fans have a product they can enjoy without trying to screw up the NCAA. College football has traditionally been about rivalries & conference champions, and we like it that way.
It could very well be that a college playoff would screw things up for that sport and its fans. I don’t know because I’m not a college fan, and the college system, in part, prevents me from becoming a fan, FWIW.
If college adopted a playoff, I could follow a team and end up with a good idea of how well my team performed each year. As it is now, I could follow a team and have no real idea how well it did except that my team performed well in a poll and perhaps qualified for one of many bowl games.
I don’t know either. I think a 4 or 8-game playoff could work well, but I’m obviously not one of those people who think it is something that is absolutely necessary. It hasn’t been for the past hundred years.
The NFL is better suited to some people’s taste, the NCAA for others. It is currently more popular than any other college sport, though, and growing.
Most people use the conference standings as a measuring stick.
This is another argument that has no credibility. The NFL regular season is way more popular than college football, proving the lie of the “devalued regular season” argument.
There is no evidence – or even any reason to suspect – that adopting a playoff format would hurt the sport’s regular-season popularity one iota. The only two possible outcomes I could imagine are no change or more popular.
Bullshit. I said other college sports. The NFL, the last time I checked, is a professional organization with teams in large metropolitan areas, and a unified marketing effort. It devalues no argument, unless you want to stupidly ignore all the inherent differences between the two sports.
Your lack of imaginaiton isn’t the NCAA’s problem, really.
Do I want a playoff? Absolutely. Until thre is one, I regard every NCAA football “championship” as utterly bogus.
But I’ve resigned myself to the fact that it just isn’t going to happen. So, I’ll gripe occasionally in forums like this, but I don’t get excited over the stupid system currently (and perpetually) in place.
But you know, I’ve reconsidered. NCAA division I football is the ONLY sport that’s doing things the right way.
The NCAA basketball tournament? The one everybody loves and watches? Scrap it. Why have Kansas play Memphis to determine the national championship? Settling things on the court is dumb! We should just have a bunch of basketball bowls! Let Memphis play UCLA, let Kansas play North Carolina, let Wisconsin play Pittsburgh, and then let the sportswriters vote for the team they thought looked the best. No need to go any farther than that.
No need for a World Series in baseball, either. At the end of the season, have a few baseball bowls. Let the Red Sox play the Indians, let the Rockies play the Angels, let the Yankees play the Phillies, and let the writers choose the team that looked best as the champion.
Come to think of it, the Big Ten is handling football all wrong. Why should their conference football championship be determined by having Ohio State PLAY against Michigan and Penn State? Why not just let every team play a series of exhibitions? THEN we could just take a vote to see who the Big TEn champion is?
I mean, letting teams compete on the field is absurd- FAR better to base championships on writers’ OPINIONS, which are far more reliable.
I mean, SURE the scoreboard said the Patriots beat the Rams 20-17 in the SUper Bowl, but come on, SKIP BAYLESS assured us there was no way the Rams could lose. Who ya gonna believe- your own lying eyes, or a professional sportswriter???
…in what is almost the biggest US sporting event of the year, yes. Seriously, we have Super Bowl Sunday, the NCAA Basketball Tournament is given an entire MONTH!
Take the 6 champions of the BCS conferences and two “at-large” bids (SEC can then stop their whining as they could get THREE TEAMS in the BCS). Seed according to the BCS rankings. Play the first round at the higher seed’s home stadium. Semi-finals, and championship at the Rose, Sugar, and Orange Bowl rotating yearly.
Only “con” I can think of is that you COULD have something wonky happen like having a BCS conference champion play @ the “at-large” team they had just beaten the previous week for the championship.
The other way to go would be to use the conference championship games (if the Pac-10 & Big-11 could muster one) as round one, with 4 at-large teams from the remaining conferences joining in. That would result in 8 teams remaining to play for all the marbles in tournament format, but the indicidual games could be played in the best 7 bowls.
I could get behind that. Anything bigger might be too much. Even though the NCAA basketball tournament is huge, the football season still generates more money.
You know, I’m having a really hard time following your logic in this whole argument. I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say that a D1-A playoff system would technically destroy traditional rivalries, or make conference championships moot. In fact, having a playoff where automatic bids would go to conference champions would probably make these games carry even MORE importance and thus attract more attention. For conferences that don’t have end-season tournaments, the big games between traditional conference powerhouses (like Ohio State-Michigan) many times are the deciding factor on who gets the championship that year anyway, so those would attract more attention as well.
As for rivalries…do you honestly think that the format of the post-season is going to change the importance of rivalries in college ball? I mean, look at Army-Navy. Two teams that almost never make any sort of post-season impact, and yet their meeting is a huge event every year that attracts coverage that would be unheard of if either team were playing anyone else (well, except Notre Dame, maybe…). Let’s face it, there is always going to be huge importance heaped upon games like Ohio State-Michigan, Texas-Oklahoma, Georgia-LSU, etc. because rivalries are always highlights of the season no matter how good or bad the competing teams are. Even UNC and Duke, who have had two of the worst football programs in the ACC for the past 10 or so years, have a big to-do when they play: it’s always the last game of the season, and the winner gets to paint the “Victory Bell” in whatever shade of blue represents their team.
Thinking that the format of the post-season is going to fundamentally change the reasons why people love and follow college football to me indicates a naive devotion to a bowl system that owes more to peacemeal compromises and here-and-there tweaking than to some vague notion of tradition. Hell, the bowl system itself has undergone so many changes in the past few decades that it’s ridiculous to say that the bowl system as it stands in 2008 is a great tradition. The Rose Bowl, that’s a hallowed tradition, I’ll grant you. Beyond that, what is it that people really want to hang onto so badly?
Oops, there are four or five, depending on which one or two teams per conference you qualify as “power programs.” Ny the way, that’s out of ten or eleven conferences, so very nearly half the conferences aren’t important at all and have no chance at even playing for a national championship. My point absolutely stands, despite your efforts to undermine it via technicality. Next time, bring argument.
Thanks for bringing this up. Scheduling is another extremely broken part of the college football season. Upstart programs aren’t able to schedule tougher OOC games because powerhouse schools won’t take the risk on a potentially tough team. Why should they? They get votes on name alone, regardless what they do on the field. Schedule your early season cupcakes, take care of business against inferior in-conference programs, and you’re in. Schools like Hawaii and West Virginia are criticized and ignored in polling because they don’t have the tougher OOC schedules… but they can’t get them! How is this fair? It’s easy for traditional powerhouse schools, like say, Penn St. and FSU, to schedule tough OOC games, they carry all the clout. Missouri isn’t getting those games.
I’ll make this more clear since you seem to have trouble understanding a simple concept. I’m a nice guy, I’ll make it a list for your convenience.
Your games do not count (and are thus not important or meaningful) if…
[ul]
[li]You are in a conference other than a powerhouse conference.[/li][li]If you are in a major conference (but aren’t a powerhouse team) and lose a game, your remaining games are meaningless.[/li][li]If you are a powerhouse program and you lose (so long as other powerhouse programs don’t lose), or if you lose twice (so long as other powerhouse programs don’t lose tw… ugh, don’t you see how stupid this is?)[/li][/ul]
That cancels out a large majority of the college football games played each season. A typical season has two very obvious national championship contenders, and everyone else doesn’t matter. So what are we actually looking at? A total of a dozen meaningful games in a typical season? Two dozen? Why does everyone repeat the argument that the regular season matters? It’s idiotic. The college football regular season is just as meaningless as any other sport, the damn thing relies heavily on polls for crying out loud, but everyone keeps rattling off this robotic talking point probably because they heard it once and never bothered to think about it.
Nice, the ol’ SMDB trump card. What a lazy response. Can you even cite conventional wisdom? I’m curious. What are you actually looking for? A blog? A hand written note? Am I supposed to write a letter to every coach and AP voter who votes in the polls? Or, more likely, do you have “Cite?” on your clipboard in case you come across an argument you can’t counter? Just listen to the radio during college football season, you’ll hear it a few times.
…that’s because it’s LSU, a perennial powerhouse. (Are you even following along? Leonard? Is that you? Maybe you should tattoo my arguments to your body between “Find him and kill him,” and “John G. raped and murdered my wife.”) LSU is going to get a major push in the polls for just being LSU. This is exactly proving my point; the system is broken. Sometimes you can’t lose any games, sometimes you can lose one, sometimes you can lose two, but only if the voters consider you a powerhouse team… There are no legitimate rules, and thus, no legitimate results. Hell, there isn’t even anyone who can explain how the BCS works, because the computer generated portion of the rankings is unknowable. Your sport is determined, in part, based on a computer system that no one actually understands. Didn’t Douglas Adams write about something like that?
It would make the fans of legitimate competition happy. Fans who value the integrity of figure skating or American Idol probably would not be happy. Your games are already watered down, you just don’t know it yet.
As a final thought, here are some other competitions that have more definitive and legitimate results:[ul]
[li]Baseball[/li][li]Basketball[/li][li]Political races[/li][li]Pie-eating competitions[/li][li]Dog shows[/ul][/li]
Actually dog shows are a great comparison to college football. If you’re a mutt, you can’t even play (like mid majors and traditional bottom feeders in powerhouse conferences). Then, you are judged on how good you look, even if you lose a competition. But at least in dog shows, every dog there is judged the same way. So it stands, dog shows have more legitimate results than college football.
I guess you’re having a bit of trouble, since I never said a playoff would destory rivalries or conference championships. I’m just addressing all those people who say that college football has to have some sort of formal playoff system. It doesn’t, and those are two reasons why.
It’s funny you keep using words like “idiotic”, “moronic”, and “robotic”, since you haven’t employed anything other than those exact types of reasoning in your argument. As I’ve said in other posts, unlike other sports, there are a lot of things that matter in college football other than an undisputed national championships. Your entire post up to this point fails to take that into consideration, and is shit.
What a shock. You can’t back up anything you’ve said.
I’m sure you can come up with some inane qualifier every time someone pokes holes in your “logic”.
If you keep saying it, maybe it will come true. Close your eyes & click your heels…
[QUOTE]
As a final thought, here are some other competitions that have more definitive and legitimate results:[ul]
[li]Baseball[/li][li]Basketball[/li][li]Political races[/li][li]Pie-eating competitions[/li][li]Dog shows[/ul][/li][/QUOTE]
Okay, but I don’t find those to be compelling reasons to NOT have a playoff system as opposed to a hackneyed bowl system that ostensibly attempts to declare a national champion anyway. I just see them (and apparently you do too) as two reasons why college football is popular. And that’s fine, but what does this have to do with not having a playoff? That’s like saying I like ABC and XYZ stores in the mall, but they shouldn’t add PQR store because I already have two places where I like to shop.
Furthermore, I still don’t see where the big divide is between the football divisions, and even between Divisions 1-A and 1-AA. Division 1-AA certainly has its share of rivalries (App. State vs. Furman is HUGE, for example), as well as fierce competition for conference bragging rights. I don’t see the D1-AA schools complaining that the playoff system is diminishing any of that, or that it’s unnecessary or arbitrary. I would think that if the NCAA insists on having SOME sort of national post-season competition to declare a national champion (which they appear to be hell bent on doing anyway, since they’ve warped the bowl system to facilitate their needs to that end), then they ought to do it right.