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All SEC final, just like 2011.
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The only undefeated team got stiffed out of the playoffs, but proved it had at least as much ability to handle Auburn as Georgia did.
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THE Ohio State University won its game over the other USC convincingly, but didn’t get a spot.
Seems to me that you won’t get a better year for demonstrating exactly why four teams isn’t enough.
We need 16 team playoff. Or at least 8 with no more than one team per conference. Here’s the dirty secret: ESPN is the dominant force in college football. They promote the teams that they think deserving, who happen to be in conferences that don’t have sports networks affiliated with other networks. So the Big Ten and Pac 12 have deals with Fox, so they get less favorable coverage on ESPN and the SEC, whose network is owned by ESPN, continues to get the favorable spin on ESPN. The committee members watch a lot of ESPN and the ESPN bias becomes its own.
It’s inevitable. I remember when the NCAA men’s basketball tournament was 16 teams and the NFL/MLB was 2 teams for the championship.
Although I do like the idea of an 8 team playoff where we get rid of subjective rules for at least 5 teams (P5 conf champs), I don’t really have a problem with how this 4 team playoff turned out.
The number 1 and 2 teams based on record and strength of schedule got into the playoffs (Clemson and Oklahoma). The remaining teams could have been 2 out of about 3, 4 or 5 teams depending on subjective criteria, but as long as the two best got in there things are good.
The fact that both of the two with best record/argument happened to lose doesn’t change the analysis of whether those two were the ones that deserved a shot more than anyone else. And to me, that is the primary goal, get the two with the best argument into the playoffs so they can determine winner on the field.
What Ohio State did was completely irrelevant because you could have made the exact same argument about USC if they had won, being a power conference champ and all.
That UCF had no shot at anything meaningful is a damn shame. I hate having a system that automatically excludes any team from winning, much less one that excludes over half the teams competing. Expanding the playoff is the only realistic way to amend that situation.
Nope, I don’t think so. There is no perfect system but adding more teams and more games isn’t the answer to an already long season. Where should you play the first round? On campus? The students have gone home for winter break. Use some of the minor bowls? Then you’re asking the alumni fan base to travel yet again. Some of these schools don’t have a massive alumni base or one that’s scattered around the USA. You’d be dealing with stadiums barely half full.
You’d also have an increased potential for injury and risk a top draft pick sitting out games as has become a trend.
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They don’t have a problem with it in the other football divisions, where a much higher percentage of athletes have to put school first, or in basketball. Any claim they make that a factor other than money is involved is bullshit.
There’s a jillion Who Cares Bowls already. Just convert 4 more of them. Or add separate playoff bowl games in the Big Bowl cities, and let the most worthless of the other bowls finally die. The problem is readily handled in other football divisions, please note.
If the NCAA finally calculates they’d have had much better TV ratings for OSU-USC if it had mattered, for instance, then they’ll make the change.
I am with you. It’s a lot to ask of student athletes to travel overall the holidays, take time from academics, and risk injury because people are mad that their football team didn’t make the playoffs.
FTR, there are 16 teams in the FCS playoffs. None of those reasons seem to apply to them.
Few of those players are planning to head to the NFL, and don’t need additional games to risk blowing out a knee before the draft.
This will be Alabama’s 14th game and Georgia’s 15th game this season, same as the teams playing in the FCS championship game if Alabama had played in the SEC title game. How many games do you expect these teams to play? It would be possible to eliminate some regular season games and make this happen, but then you’d have even less to judge the teams on. And you’d have to do this for all the teams in the major conferences since any of them could make the new playoff format.
I’m not sure if James Madison or North Dakota State make a lot of money from their football program, so having their regular season be fewer games isn’t a big problem. But removing regular season games from the big time college programs would cost a lot.
I would rather see a top-ten playoff, with two pre-bowl games to cull down the bottom 4 before the bowl playoff games. Ten is such a nice number.
If I were the king of college football I would shorten the regular-season back to 11 games, realign the conferences to make geographic sense with no more than 10 teams per conference (at least for the power conferences), eliminate conference championship games (except, perhaps, for the lower tier conferences), and expand the playoffs to 8 teams limited to conference champions, unless an independent finishes the season ranked higher than the 8th ranked conference champion. The first round of the playoffs would be played on campus sites on the weekend after Thanksgiving.
Sadly, I don’t think there is much chance of any of that being implemented. As to the OP’s question, I agree that this season’s results illustrate why a 4-team playoff is inadequate, but I don’t think it is likely to be expanded anytime soon.
Wow, we have a 4-team playoff and people are still whining about an all-SEC team final. I doubt it matters if we expand to an 8 or even 16-team format. If there’s an all-SEC final and/or USC and Ohio State aren’t in the final, then the system obviously needs to be changed.:rolleyes:
Here’s why Alabama was picked in the 4th seed: they might lose once in a while but as long as Nick Saban’s coaching, they’re probably not going to lose 30-0 on national television.
As far as UCF, I agree: I think they proved that they can at least run with the big boys. They had a great year, though it might be their last in a while. But ideally, I’d actually like to see an 8-team playoff in which there are 5 conference champions and 3 at large teams. I’m not sure it would have helped UCF this year, but they’d at least be in consideration.
These concerns are nonsense. I’ll flesh out this statement by noting that:
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On January 6th (two days before the FBS National Championship), James Madison and North Dakota State will be playing for the FCS National Championship. It will be the 15th game for each team. That’s one more than Alabama will play this season, and the equivalent of what any FBS team which plays in its conference championship, then the semis and final will play. And the season isn’t ending early for them.
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The Div II and Div III championship games were held on Dec. 15th and Dec 16th. Each of THOSE teams played, yeah, you guessed it, 15 games. AND, they played right across the traditional finals week for most semester schools (which is early Dec.). So these colleges, which have much more studenty student-athletes, don’t care that those athletes are continuing to practice and play right across their finals and finals prep.
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NO player on the four teams playing in the semi-finals of the FBS championship had any player opt out because of worry about the NFL. On the other hand, more than one player who was scheduled for a “meaningless” bowl game did so. It’s ludicrous to think that any player with a chance to add a national championship (with all the exposure involved) would opt out of a 15th or 16th game.
In short, concerns about academics are nonsense, concerns about number of games are nonsense, and concerns about potential injury in one more game in a season are nonsense. There is one and only one reason that the NCAA doesn’t have a full-blown, 16 or 32 team Div IA National Championship: The Bowls and the Conferences have combined to block it. The very second that the conferences believe that they can actually make more money for their schools via a playoff structure of 8, 16 or 32 teams, that will happen. Not before, I expect.
It would have been the 5 champions, Alabama and two other power 5 schools.
I’d only put one week between conference championship games and the playoff. Four or five weeks is way too long, I can’t understand why they still do it that way. A lot of teams are already probably traveling over the holidays as it is now, and finals should be over by mid-December so pulling students from academics shouldn’t be an issue.
This, this, THIS.
16-team playoff, but I’ll be happy with “just” 8. I think conference should be irrelevant, though; if it turns out that half of the Top-8 or Top-16 are from the SEC, so be it. But 4 is too few.
I’m in favor of having the conference championship mean something. I’d want the Power 5 champs and 3 wildcards (this year: UCF, Alabama, Wisconsin or maybe Miami).
There are potential problems with automatically taking all P5 conference champs (in previous seasons, 4-loss teams would have gotten in) but I think the positives from such a system would outweigh the negatives. The 8 team field would look like this:
5 P5 conference champs (automatic bids)
then, select up to 1 undefeated G5 team
then, select best 2-3 remaining teams, whether from P5 or G5
I hate the argument that “if we go to 8 teams, then team #9 will complain just as much as team #5 under the current system!” The legitimacy of such complaints decrease as the field increases in size. There are always talk of “snubs” in the NCAA tournament but those teams are generally not considered championship material and the hubbub dies after a day or two.
That’s another problem with expanding the tournament. At what point does the NCAA demand that it take control of it - and, more importantly, the money? I have a feeling that the reason the conferences don’t let the NCAA run it now is because they see what the NCAA did with the basketball tournament TV money (now more than half of it will go to schools based on things that have very little, if at all, to do with men’s basketball).
(At least the schools get something; UConn has received a grand total of zero dollars for all of its women’s basketball championships combined, unless you count things like profits from parking and food concessions for tournament games played in its home arena.)