Because of Title IX, a school can’t pay just the football and/or men’s basketball players - well, unless half of the students being paid are women, and they’re being paid the same as the men.
It shouldn’t be a problem for the “really big football schools” to make a clean break from the colleges, except to license their names / colors / mascots and lease out the stadiums for the home games, while the other 600+ NCAA schools that sponsor football keep playing “real” college football. The creation of FBS didn’t seem to hurt FCS, or Divisions II or III, any; why would this?
Because people are human and this stuff takes generations to build. People are fans of colleges because they or a friend or family member went to school there. Or else it’s the college that’s close by and/or represents their home state. If the teams aren’t made up of students and are instead Crimson Tide Minor League Football sponsored by the University of Alabama, that type of fandom will erode gradually. Fans will die off and new students, who aren’t bumping into the players their age on campus and watching the game 3 blocks from their dorm, won’t backfill when the old heads are gone.
Sure, some programs have fans from around the country where they have no affiliation, but that’s a pretty small subset. Alabama and OSU and a few others may be able to maintain a fanbase once the student-athlete thing is dead and gone because they are famous enough, but those schools need opponents. And teams like Ole Miss, Illinois and Colorado won’t.
People are way too casual with this kind of fandom. The US is the only place on earth where colleges(!) sell out 100k seat arenas and draw millions of viewers on TV. These are kids, 99% of whom have no future in the pros, playing a game for their school. No other feeder system has a fanbase that rivals the pro league. This is absolutely unique set of conditions and there’s no rule that it has to stick around. The old model worked and built this. Breaking the system and making if NFL lite has no guarantee that it will survive.
Who said it here? Nobody…at least not yet. Those two lines are the obvious responses (not necessarily by you) to requirements that the schools’ female athletes be paid as much as the male ones.
Winning the conference championship no longer has the cachet that it did before, sigh. Yeah 4 of the 5 get a bye, whee, but now the very real possibility exists that the team which they defeated in the CC will now get a 2nd shot at them.
Well, that, and the constant arguing about which four teams got in. It’s not so bad if you’re choosing between #12 and #13. Also, if it was entirely about the money, (a) I doubt they would play the first four games at teams’ home stadiums, and (b) they would give serious thought to making it 16 teams.
And is giving a team a second chance that big of a problem? There was a time when only conference champions got into the NCAA men’s basketball tournament.
What surprised some people is, Washington State’s athletic director, whose vote was necessary (changes to the regulations must be unanimous), supported this.
I recall a fair number of people saying the same thing back then - “oh 4 teams will definitely be enough. We won’t have to argue about the top 2 anymore and surely even if there’s an argument between 4 and 5, the best 2 will be in the mix either way”.
Meanwhile, the rest of us were saying it won’t stop at 4, would likely go to at least 8, and there would always be some argument no matter how big you made the playoff field.
I give this scheme less than 5 years before the inevitable howling about being left out at 13 begins.
Sure, and that is precisely the point - no matter what people claim, the majority of college football fans will find any number of reasons not to like the current system, no matter what “current” means at that moment.
Some may be mollified for a few years by introducing a new system, but there will rarely, and perhaps never, be a point when a majority of fans are truly satisfied with how it’s decided.
And this is not remotely a new problem. There’s a reason why there wasn’t a consensus national college football champion for several decades - because there’s too many teams spread out over too much area in a sport that has too short a season to allow for any meaningfully objective rankings.
When demand for a consensus national championship finally got too big, sure, we made one. But it had all the problems we knew it would have from the beginning. And altering it several times along the way has not addressed those fundamental issues - only put on some window dressing and kicked the can down the road a few more years.
Of course, this makes the new CFP format even better, since there aren’t 5 power conferences anymore. Heck, we’re more like 2 and a half at this point in football
Yes the new playoffs will essentially be the SEC + Big Ten tournament (both conferences will get at least two teams each in, most likely three), but at least a school from a “smaller” school will have a “chance”.
You’re right that some fans will complain about number 13 being left out, but I don’t think it will get nearly as much traction as arguments about the number 5 time being left out. Looking at the final rankings I see some challenges and fun conversations about 11-16, but I still see them as fairly interchangeable.
This season was a good example of multiple teams being deservedly in the running for the 4th spot, but ultimately they got it right and it showed in the resulting games.
Let’s be honest here - there wasn’t a lot of traction about 4 vs 5 either. Playoff expansion, whether in college football or other sports, is never about the ‘what if’ game or deserving teams getting a shot. It’s about revenue.
What we did have was a lot of traction about money and how it would go around. That’s why we have 5+7 instead of just 8 teams - the Group of 5 conferences wanted a guaranteed entry and the Power 5 (well, what’s left of them) conferences wanted to maintain their superior status
So, yeah, I do still see a lot of griping going on. Will those gripes be legitimate? I’m not even sure what that means. I don’t think it’s really possible to have a legitimate college national championship in football on the field. So I think all the griping dating back to the original BCS and to the earlier era are all equally legitimate, or maybe equally illegitimate.
The first time a 12 seed upsets a 1 seed will see some fans complaining about ‘any given bowl game’ and how it’s no longer about finding the best team in football. And others will say they were the best on that given day. And still others about how the regular season is totally devalued. And they will all be equally right (or equally wrong).
The true universal truth is college football fans like to debate and gripe, and that’s not going to change, especially with these changes.
I’m looking forward to the first big upset. The hot take loving sports media will go nuts.
There is plenty of time at the end of the season for whining and griping before bowl games start. They have to fill the airtime with something I guess.
It has always bothered me that D1 doesn’t just do a tournament like D2 and D3. If little schools can handle the logistics then a D1 school shouldn’t have any problems. They could even mix in home games with some traditional bowl sites. But they would’ve done that already if they thought it would be more profitable.
You mean FCS, D2, and D3. The division namings don’t make sense anymore.
The issue is the same one that’s been around for decades - between the haves and have-nots.
Outside the FBS, conference champions get automatic bids. That hasn’t been the case in the FBS historically and under the new scheme, only 1 team out of the Group of 5 is set to have that. There’s also a maximum of 11 games in the regular season, and the lost revenue can be a deal breaker as well at the top levels.
If the interest is in an actual playoff field (though in the lower divisions it’s still mostly determined by a selection committee), the big conferences have to play along. But that means losing playoff spots to the lesser conferences. And there’s no real interest in that.
And at the top tiers, it means potentially a lot more games for players who will be risking injury and draft status for not a lot of gain. I can see a lot of potential opt-outs if they’re being asked to play up to 5 or 6 more games on top of a 12 game regular season vs getting healthy and in shape for the draft.
Basically money, money, and more money. That’s less of an issue at the lower levels, where very few players have any real chance of making it to the NFL and schools aren’t going to spend or make a lot of money on sports.
Money is definitely the biggest part of the problem. Why risk your draft stock and payday by playing in what may be an inconsequential tournament game if your team can’t go all the way?
I know rookie NFL contracts aren’t as lucrative as they used to be but at least NIL can help make up the difference, for now.
Back in the early aughts when I was in HS, the top athletes always picked the all star games (State or National vs County or Regional) that gave them the most exposure and the best chance to play at a top school. It makes sense that college athletes would do the same thing.
I am pretty sure the reason the NCAA doesn’t run an FBS football tournament is, the FBS schools, especially the power conferences and Notre Dame, don’t want the NCAA to put its hands on the money. They have seen what the NCAA did with the basketball TV money, half of which goes to schools based on things that have nothing to do with basketball.
Keep in mind that a 12 seed can’t play a 1 seed until the semi-finals. (12 would play 5 in the first round, then 4 in the quarter-finals.)