A little bit, yeah.
/Just watched the 8-8 Chargers use home field advantage to edge the 12-4 Colts in OT
:rolleyes:
How about saying: I just watched the Chargers, who were on a four-game win streak, during which they averaged over 40 points a game, outlast a pretty good Colts team, thus making clear once again that it isn’t enough to be the team with a better record: you still have to win the game?
I don’t know what that means.
All credit to the Chargers for winning the game, it was a great effort, and fun overtime to watch. I think its a joke that the system gives a team that lost as many games that it won a chance to win the championship.
It’ll be interesting to see the rankings tomorrow morning. The BCS Title game wasn’t conclusive to my mind.
Well, i’d be happy to debate whether the NFL playoff system is ideal. Personally, i think that allowing 12 teams out of 30 to make the playoffs is too many. I’d be happy with 8, like baseball. I also think there’s some argument to be made for setting a minimum number of wins; for example, a division winner has to have a record of 9-7 or better, otherwise their place is taken by another wildcard team.
But, whether or not you like the current system, the fact is that a team like San Diego still has to win four straight games against some of the best teams in the country in order to lift the trophy.
For San Diego to win this year, they will have to beat (to offer one plausible scenario):
Indianapolis (12-4)
Pittsburgh (12-4)
Baltimore (11-5)
Carolina Panthers (12-4)
If they do that, then i think they deserve to be called the best. The playoff system, while perhaps not perfect, is long enough and rigorous enough that getting through it undefeated is a fair indication of team quality. There is just no comparable trial in college football.
Of course it wasn’t. It never can be, by definition, precisely because determining who gets there in the first place is such an irrational process.
The only “decisive” thing about it is that Florida beat Oklahoma, on that day, at that time. This would be true whether the final score was 9-6 or 56-0.
Which would make San Diego’s inclusion even more absurd as now San Diego gets in over Baltimore too.
I realize I prompted people in this thread, but I hardly hear anybody VOLUNTEER complaints about the NFL system, and they use the same “conference champions + at-large bids” system I’d like to see in college football.
Except that, if you read my whole post, you might have noticed that i also proposed a system for making sure that teams with better records get in.
To be quite honest, i’d be happy to get rid of divisions altogether, and just have the best 4 teams in each conference make the playoffs. The very presence of divisions, especially in combination with an unbalanced schedule where teams play more games within their division than outside, means that it’s always difficult to ensure fairness in the selection process.
Actually, being completely logical, even conferences fuck things up, because it’s quite possible in any given year that the two or three best teams will be in the AFC, or the NFC. Yet the Superbowl requires one team from each conference. Again, that’s why i like the English Premier League. There are 30 teams, every team has identical schedules, and there are no “weak” or “strong” divisions (no divisions at all, in fact) to unfairly allow one team to leapfrog another.
Damn, the Utes got edged in the AP poll by the Gators.
ESPN showed the coaches poll. All coaches are required to vote #1 for whoever wins the BCS bowl. Sixty votes for Florida, and one vote for Utah.
ESPN: “Huh, wonder who that one vote was from?”
Heh heh.
Eh, I’d say ~30 votes is a little more than edged. Pansy writers :mad:
Florida lost an early season game to Ole Miss, who was unranked at the time and finished the season ranked 14, but finished strong and beat 6 ranked teams.
USC lost an early season game to Oregon state, who was unranked at the time and finished the season ranked 18, but finished the strong and beat 4 ranked teams. Their division went undefeated in bowl games despite being dismissed as weak early in the year.
Texas started strong, but lost a late season game to Texas Tech. Texas beat 5 ranked teams.
Utah went undefeated and beat 3 ranked teams.
Any of these teams has a good argument for being the best team in the nation and there’s no way the current system is going to sort a mess like this year out. It works great when there are two undefeated BCS conference teams, but any other year, it creates a mess.
I agree with this in principle, but football (both NFL and college) is a different case because there is a large number of teams and a small number of games. There’s no way to have any kind of all-play-all system, so a divisional system makes some sense.
Well, in the NFL you could have all-play-all within each conference (15 games), with no inter-conference games during the regular season. Sort of like baseball in the days before inter-league play; the AFC and NFC would not face off until the Superbowl.
And in college football, it would only work in conjunction with my earlier suggestion, which was a true national tournament of the 16 or so best teams, with each team playing every other team in the tournament. You could have a second-string tournament of the next 16 teams, and so on.
And then, to ensure that the national championship was not forever restricted to the same 16 teams, you could have a promotion/relegation system like English soccer where (for example), the bottom three teams from Tier I drop down to Tier II for the following year, and the top three teams from Tier II get to play in the big tournament the next year.
Yes, i realize this will never happen, for a multitude of reasons. I just throwing ideas out.
FWIW, I’m with those that has qualms with the NFL structure.
But the main difference here are that the NFL schedule is fixed in place by the league. Everybody has a roughly even slate. In college it’s not remotely close. Aside from the conference issues, fully 1/3 of teams’ games are nonconference, and determined by not much more than the AD’s wishes. A 6+2 format makes chumps out of those teams that play a serious nonconference slate.
Imagine Florida had lost to Alabama in the SEC championship. A 6+2 format would probably have left them on the outside looking in at the playoff – despite still having beaten more bowl teams than Texas Tech and Utah combined. Silly them for playing a tough schedule…
There are 11 FBS Div I conferences and about 120 schools. Div III has 400 schools, and a 32-team playoff. Div II and Div I-AA (yes, I know, but I’m still calling it what it really is) have about 200 teams and a 16 team playoff.
Take each of the 11 Div 1 conference champions, and the highest-rated non-champion, and put them in a 12 team playoff. Seed the champions of the Pac-10, the Big-10, the Big-12 and the SEC with byes the first week. Have various of the Bowls sign up to host playoff games (there would be 10 games before the championship game). They will pay through the nose to do this. Then have a national championship game.
Playoffs work for all the other NCAA divisions. No one complains that Richmond, Minnesota-Duluth or Mount Union are undeserving champions. That’s cause they got there through a playoff system. If you want a true Champion, that’s the way to do it.
Now, if you want to go back to arguing who is the BEST team (the team that should be ranked #1), then they should dump this artificial system of determining it, and simply go back to the old system of bowl games. After all, that is an argument that has no definitive answer, so why try to artificially create one??
Actually, they will not. The Sugar Bowl took Utah because they knew Alabama would sell all the tickets. Same thing with Georgia vs Hawaii.
Stick Penn State vs USC in the Sugar Bowl in a playoff semifinal and they’d be lucky to sell half the tickets.
I don’t understand why people think that Texas has a good argument. IF they had blown out Ohio State AND IF Oklahoma had won, then they would have an argument.
HOWEVER:
1.) Texas barely got by the 2nd best team in the Big 10.
2.) …Which was one of 2 teams that Southern Cal dominated.
3.) Furthermore, the team that beat Texas got dominated by a middle-of-the-road SEC team.
Ergo, Texas is not in the same league as Southern Cal.
The only argument that Texas can make is that they should have been the team to lose to Florida, instead of Oklahoma.
I don’t know enough about who Southern Cal or Utal played this year to do a similar analysis, but I’m going to agree that Utah and Southern Cal have a legitimate argument. I’d love to see Southern Cal play Utah, and the winner play Florida for the NCG. But at this point, only those 3 teams can make a legitimate argument.
What the world is waiting for: 1. Florida v. 16. Troy in mid-December on a neutral field.
Bowls make their business off of people setting up their vacations to spend time in the host city, with an identity created by their history and the conferences they’re associated with. Some local economies depend heavily on the increased revenues that result from bowl games and visiting fans. I’m not so sure that the Peach Bowl, which stages a very popular SEC-ACC game in Atlanta every New Year’s Eve, will be chomping at the bit to become the NCAA Regional Semifinal between the 5 and the 12 seeds in mid-December.
To quote the Big East Commissioner: “Don’t insult my intelligence . . . don’t compare I-AA football to I-A football. Appalachian State- Delaware, that’s a great game, but they are not operating in the limelight that I-A is. For anyone to think there could be a I-A playoff during exams – the press demands, the television demands, they’re just huge.”
Here, we agree.
I don’t understand why a system where pollsters rank teams, and then they have a 2-team playoff, is inferior to BOTH a simple pollster ranking, AND an x-team playoff (where x = a number apparently > 2.)