Damn straight I do - but it doesn’t have to be anything more than a plus-one game, matching two teams chosen from the traditional bowl winners.
The arguments about taking too much time away from school don’t seem to apply at the lower divisions, which can play as many as 4 extra games, and nearly all of whose players have no chance at the NFL anyway. It doesn’t apply to any other sport, many of whom require midweek travel even for regular season matches.
Let’s not kid ourselves - I-A football is a business, and the lack of playoffs is due to business considerations only - specifically, the bowls’ ad revenue. There’s nothing different or special about football inherently except the amount of cash involved.
A playoff will have the same problems. Who plays who. Who gets in who doesn’t. Football is too dangerous to just keep adding games. Too many injuries and potential careers stopped.
Where do you play? Home field advantage is big.
No matter how it is configured some one will not like it. We trade todays problems for tomorrows. I liked it when the bowls were just bowls.
I don’t think that rivalries will become less important if a playoff is instituted. I was just giving one reason why a National Champion hasn’t traditionally been a big deal in college footall. They are also reasons why some people, myself included, don’t actively want a large playoff. I don’t actively hate the idea either. However, when someone asks what I want or don’t want, it can be somewhat bothersome for people to tell me I’m wrong when I give an answer to the question. (Not aimed at you, btw.)
I think some people fear that the college football season will become as uninteresting as the college basketball regular season if playoffs come to be. I don’t think that will necessarily happen, but I can sympathize with someone who embraces a philosophy of “don’t mess with an incredible product”.
Money is absolutely why the ACC expanded to 12 teams not long ago - or, more specifically, football money. As intensely popular as basketball is among the “old guard” ACC crowd (UNC, Duke, NC State, Maryland, etc.), it has nowhere near the corporate revenue potential that football does, which is why the ACC ended up with the “football schools” of Miami, Boston College, and Virginia Tech. Of course, if you load up a conference with football powerhouses, they all just end up beating on each other (they’re mandated to by conference scheduling), which dilutes their individual chances of advancing to the major bowls. Sigh.
This is why I bristle at the notion that bowls are some unique, storied tradition that make a single subdivision of one sport somehow special. At the end of the day, they’re about money, not tradition. Schools and conferences can’t make money off of things like Reggie Bush USC jerseys (or whoever is the current much-hyped Heisman hopeful) or video games with active college players, so for them corporate sponsor money is the way to go in terms of gaining non-ticket revenue.
The sad thing is, the NCAA already messed with the incredible product when they invested in the BCS system.
Perhaps it would be better to some people if division 1-A didn’t declare a national champion at all, but I think we are well beyond the point of that being a popular notion among the administrators of the sport. The NCAA has expressed a desire to standardize many other aspects of all collegiate sports, so for D1-A to go without a championship determination would be counter to that.
What I think most people are arguing is that a playoff would be better than the BCS system as it stands today, and it seems pretty hard to rise specifically to the defense of the BCS if you use any argument other than money. It’s somewhat baffling that the NCAA would eschew a post-season system that has been established in every other sport and football division in favor of a highly byzantine, poorly understood series of corporate-sponsored games that only superficially resembles the bowl system of old. To me, talking about the tradition of bowls is irrelevant because this tradition has already been thrown out. The toothpaste is already out of the tube, as it were.
I don’t think you’ll hear a single college football fan stick up for the bowl system. You’ll hear some of the powers that be use it as an excuse, but not many college football fans really care one way or the other about the bowl system.
Also, the BCS is really only a two-team playoff. Most people who think the BCS is terrible are really just upset at the lack of a more sophisticated playoff system.
Well…yeah, that’s basically what I was saying above
I don’t like the BCS not just because only one game matters in terms of post-season standings, but also because having the other 30 or so bowls smacks of a wholesale money grab on the part of the NCAA. I mean, who is going to remember who won the Kellogg’s Pop-Tarts Bowl Sponsored In Part By Brylcreem five or ten years down the road?
Like I said before, the time has passed when D1-A football could get away with NOT having a national champion declared, for better or worse. And again, this sentiment comes not from me but from the NCAA itself. So therefore if you HAVE to have a post-season exchange, a formal playoff system makes sense to a lot of people because the groundwork is already there as has been established by other sports and divisions. And sure, it could have problems of schools feeling like they weren’t given a proper shot to win the national title, but at least with a bigger field you can use a much more simplified seeding method such as just taking all the conference champs and making those your contenders (the sub-division system, I suspect, would rule out a lot of the mid-major and smaller conferences from the get-go, since IIRC many of those compete in D1-AA anyway). You wouldn’t even need a computer to figure out any of this if at-large bids were not used.
All true, but you can’t blame the BCS for that. They have nothing to do with the other bowls.
Great post. Small nitpick, though: those mid-majors (WAC, Mountain West, Conf. USA, etc.) are all I-A. That is one huge can of worms that will need to be opened as all of this is eventually settled. There are something like 108 I-A scools, and many people think there should be another division created after most of those are kicked out of single A competition.
Yes, let’s give the NCAA a little credit - for many decades, the championship was decided by a poll of fat drunks with writer’s credentials - two different sets of them, that is. The BCS, for all of its flaws, has gotten closer with every change to providing a true playoff system. The only problem remaining, for those of us who want to see a true champion decided conclusively and on the field, is in years when 3 or more teams have an equal claim to be in the title game. But never, it seems, are there more than 4, and after the bowls, there are never more than 2 anyway. So, other than the money issue ( ), the answer seems obvious.
FTR, it isn’t “1-A and 1-AA” anymore, I know, but the new names are stupid and take too long to type anyway.
Another huge flaw: the rankings depend heavily on votes by people who may or may not even bother to do the voting!
In their, coaches know plenty about football and should be highly qualified to cast votes.
In reality,
Coaches have tunnel vision. They know ALL about teams on their schedule, NOTHING about the other teams. Mack Brown can tell you everything you’d ever want to know about Oklahoma or Texas A & M. He hasn’t a clue whether UCLA or Penn State is any good this year. But his preseason vote will have a lot of bearing on who has a chance to get into the final mix.
Coaches don’t have the time or interest to cast votes. As often as not, they give their ballots to secretaries or flunkies. The secretaries and flunkies just look at what the standings were last time, move the winners up a notch and move the losers down a notch. Most don’t really know what they’re doing.
But hey, who needs a playoff? Much better to hand the decision to guys who have neither the knowledge nor the time to cast informed votes.
One solution is much simpler than a playoff. Return the bowls to their historical rivalries then just add one sentence to the rulebook.
“Should the two major polls disagree on whom is the NCAA National Champion a one game playoff is to ensue.”
Might have some media yahoos trying to rig the AP poll so they can cover another huge sporting event, but to have a National Championship game only once every couple years would be awfully exciting.
You guys are apparently under the mistaken impression that determining a National Champion is important. It’s not, and the more energy that the media puts into deciding a “National” Champion the worse the sport of college football as a whole becomes.
The BCS has already horribly damaged the value of conference titles and rendered all but the big 4 Bowl games almost insignificant. Because College Football is unique in that it plays a relatively short schedule amidst a huge pool of teams it was at it’s finest when it was essentially a regional game. Fans in the Midwest cared about the Big Ten and the Rose Bowl and as a result followed all the teams in the Big Ten closely. Nowadays only Michigan and Ohio State get any real media attention and that’s to the detriment to overall fan interest in the bulk of regular season games.
Having a playoff system will only further exasperate the overly myopic media coverage of the 15 or so “Power” programs and put a heavier weigh on the already foolish concept of “polling” and rankings.
Remember that as few as 20 years ago the idea of a “National Champion” was an afterthought. It was simply released in the newspapers on January 2nd as the final AP Poll and that’s it. It never claimed to be anything more than a collection of sportswriters opinions encapsulated. People who get frustrated by the BCS are simply trying to force a square peg into a round hole by expecting a designation of a champion to do something it was never intended to do.
First, for anybody but a fan of the school, I’m not sure any but the “big four” were all that significant in the first place.
Second, I’d argue that the lesser bowls falling to the wayside is due much more to the NCAA adding a ridiculous number of bowl games to the schedule. How is “going bowling” a special occasion anymore when you can get in with a 7-5 record and couldn’t even finish in the top half of their conference (with 3 of your 7 wins no doubt coming against cupcake opponents)? :rolleyes:
Here are the two big flaws of a non-playoff system
The top D1 schools habitually refuse to play quality midmajors. They’ll play each other in an incestuous sort of “at least one of us will be #1” unwritten agreement or they’ll beat the crap out of a Troy State. If one of you traditionalist say again that these midmajors should play tougher competition, are you going to require the big name colleges to accept the challenges?
The pooling system makes it impossible for a non-major division team to get to #1 or #2. Only 3 non-BCS (and the the fact that there are BCS conferences and non-BCS conferences should tell you something) have even made a big bowl game. Let’s say Idaho recruits a couple great players and has a innovative coach, a couple of good past seasons, no injuries, and now as a group of seniors they have a perfect season. How high could they conceivably be ranked even though they may be the best team in the nation? If you mention #1 then did you account for the fact that Alabama, USC, and Wisconsin all refused to play them once they started getting good?
If you think not having a playoff is a good idea, then tell me the lowest pre-season poll ranking an eventual national champoion has ever been. Ninth? Tenth? Eleventh? So out of 119 teams, only a dozen have a chance to win the national championship and the other 107 cannot no matter what they do on the field?
You make good points here, but as I see it, railing against the concept of declaring a national champion in college football is going to make little impact in the long run, unfortunately. This has just as much or more to do with the stubbornness of the NCAA as it does with the media and/or the fans.
Why is college football no longer a regional game? I can think of a few reasons that don’t have much to do with the post-season:
college football coverage has increased exponentially in the past few decades. In days past, people followed their local teams and didn’t really have much access to coverage of games in other parts of the country. Nowadays, the entire market of college ball is saturated to the point where you can not only watch your local teams duke it out on Saturday, but you can watch some random teams from a conference that you didn’t even know existed play on Thursday, Friday, Tuesday…I mean, is there any day of the week now that is totally immune from all football coverage? As long as people keep tuning into college football games, outlets such as ESPN will know they will have a guaranteed viewer block, no matter what teams they show. And, I suspect, there are a fair number of people who watch football just because they like the sport, not necessarily because they support a particular team.
the regional lineups themselves are changing. Sports conferences are not static. Teams are added and lost over the years, and perhaps no other sport affects this as much as football. I’ve heard that there was a lot of trepidation on the part of ACC die-hards back when Florida State was added to the conference not too long ago. Nowadays their presence is generally accepted, they’ve been let into the clubhouse, heck even a mini-rivalry has sprung up between FSU and ACC long-timer Clemson (granted, this has a lot to do with the Bowdens, but still). I suspect the same will be the case with Va. Tech, Miami, and B.C. years down the road, as much some ACC “traditionalists” don’t like the idea of a once predominantly southeastern region conference including a school from Boston, for example. The wider the area that each conference draws from, the more nationalized the game becomes. Look at Conference USA, for crying out loud.
more schools are wanting a piece of the pie. One of the major football stories from last year was the come-from-nowhere success of the University of South Florida squad. This is a school that did not exist until 1956. Their football team did not play a game until 1997, and did not join D 1-A until 2001. Last season, they managed to climb to #2 in the AP Poll despite beginning the season unranked. This kind of success story made waves not only in the Big East, but across the country as well, and along with the surprise success of Rutgers the previous season, suggested that “Cinderellas” CAN exist in football. As long as that is a viable notion, and as long as football is a popular and lucrative sport, many schools are going to want that kind of attention and success - and the surprises are going to come from areas where football has traditionally not been a big deal. Obviously, or they wouldn’t be surprises.
So while the BCS is indeed a broken system, I think we are currently seeing a major sea change in the way that the country watches and follows football. IMO, the clamor for a national championship is a symptom of the nationalization of college ball, not the cause of it.
(P.S.: about USF and Rutgers: both teams defeated my adorably pathetic UNC Tar Heels football squad relatively early in their respective highly successful seasons. If there is an opposite to Kryptonite, I think we would be it. So I’m gonna go out on a limb here and predict that McNeese State, Carolina’s home opener opponent, will be the team to watch this season.)
This is a great counter-example to my earlier claim that you need to be ranked in the top 12 preseason to be national champions - but I think we can all agree that last year was highly unusual in college football rankings. If we can see schools from non-power conferences get high rankings then I will stand corrected, but it wasnt that long ago that Tulane and Marshall went undefeated and didn’t even get a BCS bowl bid.
It’s a chicken vs. the egg situation. The two concepts are linked and they feed each other. I’m stressing the opinion that this is inherently a bad thing and that adding a playoff system would go a long way to propagating and cementing the problem.
Currently when you tune into every College Football show and Sportscenter you see in-depth coverage of LSU, Miami, USC, Michigan, OSU, Notre Dame, Texas and a few minutes on whatever the ranked teams du jour are. The coverage of these teams are pervasive and constant. Every fan knows who the starting QB is and future NFL stars are on those teams. That’s all fine-and-dandy but all that information comes in place of coverage on those teams outside of the predicated media darlings. Most middle tier schools, even major BCS schools like Washington, Michigan State, Tennessee and Pitt, get almost zero coverage aside from score on the crawl every Saturday unless they are ranked in the top 20 or playing their conference heavy weight. Back in the day, before 24 hour ESPN and the Internet, I could be assured that the Saturday network shows would cover all the teams that were in my region. Back then I would have to go out of my way to learn anything about LSU, but I would know what the deal was with Iowa, which was a heck of a lot more relevant to me.
Personally I find all the attention paid to the premier programs to be boring as sin. I turn off coverage when they start prattling on about the top 10 teams unless my team or one of it’s rivals is in it. I simply have no reason to be attached to LSU or USC. Once we have a playoff system this ambivalence to teams outside the top 25 will be exasperated.
In a perfect world ESPN’s Gameday would have segments and storylines that discussed the competition to win each conference as opposed to national rankings. In doing so they’d be taking the time to cover each conference in depth and to at least pay a token effort to the non-power schools on a weekly basis and the coverage would be equally dispersed. As it is we get 50 minutes of debate about the top 10 teams and 10 minutes of everything else, so you get short shrift if you are a fan of any other team. In the long run that’s going to erode the national fan interest because it marginalizes the majority of fans.
Oh, no disagreement here that last year was a very strange one for football. USF didn’t only perform some upsets to get to where they did - in a way they were capitalizing on the non-success of other teams, and really burst onto the scene at the right time to be noticed.
Of course, there are occasionally going to be very good teams that get shafted in the BCS picture - I’m thinking of Boise State a few years back. I guess my earlier point was that the BCS system as it stands now is not prepared to handle a rogue non-traditional football power emerging from outside the Ohio States and the USCs, although the situation I think is a bit easier on teams from established power conferences - what if Kansas had won the Big 12 North last season?
In terms of commentary coverage (I think ESPN and its spinoffs do a pretty good job of showing numerous games from across the country), I don’t know if it’s really all that fair to say that a national sports network should stress coverage on a regional level. I mean, sure they could break down things region by region, but given the time constraints on what they can talk about, they probably figure that this is the domain of the local affiliates: the major networks and possibly the regional Fox Sports channels. In my area, our football teams aren’t exactly spectacular, but they get an insane amount of coverage precisely because they’re local, so local fans never go away disappointed. You did mention that “back in the day” before ESPN this was the case: you could always find a place to get great local coverage. Well, I’m saying that that hasn’t really changed, local networks still cover local teams quite well from what I can see. Our stations around here couldn’t care less about the Hallowed Tradition of the Michigan-Ohio State rivalry, but if Butch Davis so much as sneezes, hey, we’ve got a crew on the scene, film at 11.
Would ESPN’s coverage change substantially if there were no national title race? I’m not so sure. Even if teams like Ohio State, Michigan, USC, Texas, etc. weren’t vying for the national championship, they would still be hugely popular teams, and thus would generate a large amount of attention. Conferences with more fervent football traditions, such as the SEC and the Big 10, would end up getting more coverage than lesser football powers such as the ACC and the A-10. Perhaps if there were a playoff system with automatic bids for the conference champs, each individual conference would get MORE attention, similar to how conference contests are covered in basketball: everyone wants to get an idea of the bracket picture before they even officially announce the pairings, and a big part of that is figuring out who all of the automatic bids are going to be. But when the reality is that only the top 3 or 4 elite teams have even a marginal shot at playing for the national title, naturally the coverage is going to be rather myopic. Perhaps it would be a bit less so if there were no national title race (or specifically no BCS), but to think that every team from every part of the country would get equal airtime if that were the case is a bit naive, I think.
I made an argument for this type of system in a previous thread on the topic and I agree. The scenario I proposed had all the major conferences playing a mandatory conference title game as a defacto first round game (in the process giving each major conference 2 automatic seeds in the playoffs). Then the smaller conference champions played one another in that first round, and you would pair up the conferences the same way annually to create new quasi rivalries. Then the quarter final round would be the historic “bowl” pairings in the big bowl games, the Rose Bowl would pair the Big Ten and Pac-10 with a chance to play in the semis. I think this is the only way that you could avoid the problems I mentioned because it essentially takes the onus off of the media polls (and by extension takes the meaning out of the stupid preseason rankings) and puts it squarely on the results of conference play. Any system that requires the top 16 seeds based on the AP poll is going to be too biased towards “popular” and “traditional” powers, it’d just be the BCS on a bigger scale.
I’m not saying that teams should get equal airtime, just that as the discussion of conference champions (and by extension the traditional bowl tie ins to 2nd and 3rd place teams) gets played down discussion becomes far to focused on the top 5. For the last 2 or 3 weeks of the season very good 9-3 teams get no air time because all they discuss are the 3rd and 4th ranked teams and if they can overtake the 2nd ranked team. Having a playoff that is based on prejudiced polling for a playoff would make the problem worse and more permanent.
), the answer seems obvious.