Yes, I know there will be teams left out. But a 2-team playoff? That’s moronic. You can’t leave undefeated teams out and claim you have found the best team in college football, because there’s simply no objective metric you can use to eliminate a team who hasn’t lost a game. There’s not, and we all know it. A 16-team playoff would be just about perfect. As I said, it would include any undefeateds, plus allow any 1-loss, and most 2-loss teams to prove themselves.
Work the 16th place bubble any way that seems most fair, but it’s less of a tragedy if a 2 or 3-loss team gets left out than if a freaking UNDEFEATED gets left out.
Hopefully damn cold! That’s one of the unique things about football. It’s one of the few sports where you’re expected to play though and combat inclement weather. If there are delays it’s due to safety issues, not due to an uncomfortable environment.
Yes. And you could even avoid a lot of the problem by playing the first round of an 8 team playoff at the higher seed. Then you have one game netural field and the National Championship, of which, yes, I do believe there will be enough fans to fill the stadium twice in a month.
Yes, but the more teams you add, the more likely it is you have the best team included (and the more likely you can be sure adding more is of no benefit). Sure, some team could argue they’re better than the #8 team, but arguing over who is #8 is much less likely to effect who the eventual champion is than arguing over who is 1 & 2.
Let’s look at my proposed system in 2004. I’m using this site: http://espn.go.com/college-football/rankings/_/year/2004/week/16
This situation would likely have ended up with #1 vs. #4 and #2 vs. #3, but to make things interesting, I’m making the picks as controversial as I can.
The Rose Bowl can’t pick a Big 10 team, so they have to choose from Auburn, Texas or California. Let’s say they pick Texas (Since Auburn would be the logical choice and California is obviously out).
Whatever bowl has to pitt Oklahoma vs. Auburn, California or Utah. Obviously they would pick Auburn, but let’s say they pick California.
The next bowl has to pit #3 Auburn against a top 8 team. It’s either going to be Utah or Va. Tech. Let’s just say that Utah gets snubbed.
The 4th major bowl game is going to be Utah vs. a top 10 team. It’s going to be Georgia.
So we have: #1Southern Cal vs. #4 Texas #2 Oklahoma vs. #5 California #3 Auburn vs. #8 Va. Tech #6 Utah vs. #7 Georgia
The top 5 teams in this situation all have a chance to prove that they belong in the top 2.
Obviously, for Utah or Georgia to get a shot at the NCG they would have to absoulutely beat the shit out of their opponent, but that’s what happens when your regular season isn’t good enough to get you in the top 5.
So, yeah, a plus 1 system is going to work in this case, no matter how you slice it.
2007 was a tricky case, with no undefeated teams. But let’s look at it with my system, just for shits and giggles.
The Rose Bowl is #1 Ohio State vs. #7 USC
The Sugar Bowl is #2 LSU vs. #3 Va. Tech
The next bowl is #4 Oklahoma vs. #5 Georgia
The other bowl is #6 Missouri vs. #9 West Virginia
Then we redo all the polls and the top 2 teams go to the NCG.
Or we could go with a plus 1 system that is a strict 1v4 and 2v3 . Either way, how does a plus 1 not work? Because a 1-loss Kansas or a 2-loss Georgia gets left out? I don’t think that either of those teams made the case for being deserving of being National Champions that year.
Uh, no. USC, Auburn and Utah all win, then you still have an undefeated team being left out of the championship game, which is sort of the entire point.
Your argument for why it does work is the exact same one that we have now to exclude Boise.
My picks were a worst case scenario. The chances that Auburn wouldn’t get picked for either of the first 2 bowl games reside somewhere between slim and none.
You are assumming that all 3 undefeated teams win their games against top ranked opponents. The chances of this reside in the “slim” area, mathematically speaking.
So, yeah, my system does leave open the slimmest of chances that there could be an undefeated team that doesn’t win the NC. The only thing with a smaller probablility of happening than that, though, is an 8- or 16-team playoff replacing the current bowl system.
If you want to fantisize about an alternate universe where the bowls wield no power, then go ahead. I’m keeping my fantasies in the real world (where I actually could win the lottery).
I’m pretty sure sponsors could find a way to get their names in front of 6 games.
Hell, we pretty much figured that 5 teams are the most that are ever going to have a legit gripe? (if there aren’t 5 undefeated teams there can be tie-breakers so that the results on the field dictate everything. Out of the potential 1 loss teams, the one with the best scoring difference or whatever gets picked).
Bowl game 1: 4 vs 5
Bowl game 2: 2 vs 3
Bowl game 3: 1 vs winner of 4 vs 5
Championship
I’ve been a big proponent of the Plus 1 plan, for many of the reasons Rucksinator covers. Additionally, you wouldn’t even have to change any of the postseason games as they are scheduled now (1v4 and 2v3 on New Years, national championship the week following, just like the current BCS game). And also, most years, you can feel pretty confident that four teams will cover everyone who has a real, serious claim to the championship (and practically always all the undefeated teams).
But yeah, there are some years when you end up with five. Snarky’s plan has merit. I could get behind that. It does stretch out the final determination of the champion to three weeks (week one, 4v5 and 2v3; week two, 1v 4-5 winner; then championship) and it gives the 2-3 winner the benefit of a bye week before the championship, which the 1 team doesn’t get. But it’s the next best thing to the Plus 1, in my opinion.
This is a decent plan. I just want to point out 3 things:
So if you’re ranked 4th or 5th, you could end the year 16-0, whereas if you’re ranked 1-3 you will play 15 games at most. One of these 2 teams will play in 2 different major bowl games and could play in 3 of them. It just seems odd and I’m not sure how that shakes out financially. But I guess it is done elsewhere. Which brings up…
This stretches things out over at least 2 full weeks (3 weekends). So your first bowl game would have to be around Christmas (unless you took things to mid-January). I’m not sure which, if any, of the 4 major bowls would agree to be a quarter-final Christmas game every 4th year. See if you can talk the Rose Bowl Committee into this.
We rotated the games before, but that was changed. One year you could have had an SEC team playing an ACC team in the Rose Bowl for the NCG, and the next a Pac-10 team could be playing a Big-10 team in the Sugar Bowl for the NCG. I believe that this was changed to the current system because it messed up the traditional bowl games. So I really don’t think this plan has much of a chance of happening.
16 teams. 4 extra games. What’s wrong with that? Lack of ticket sales would such an incredible non-issue, plus you’d still have the significance of the regular season and the pressure to go undefeated, or at worst, 1-loss. You don’t want to be in that 2-loss/3-loss area of uncertainty.
I think the “special bowl game” argument has at least some merit (Rose Bowl, etc, nobody cares about Bob’s Tittyfuck Bowl). It’s too bad that there are 5 of them and not 3 or 7, since then you could have a playoff and have the last 2 or 3 rounds be the special bowls.
I don’t at all buy the “it makes the season too long” argument. They don’t play very many games to begin with and take a huge break at the end of the regular season. Selling out wouldn’t be an issue. Playing in the cold is a non-issue.
I don’t know why the Cotton bowl isn’t one of the biggies, or why the Fiesta Bowl is, but I say we rotate the Rose, Sugar and Orange bowls around the 2 semi-final games and the NCG, and have the Fiesta, Cotton, and 2 others be the quarter finals.
I don’t think you need more than 8 teams in. I also think it should be the conference champions of the “big 6” and the highest ranked champions of the other conferences. I also think you have to be ranked in the top 15 (?negotiable?) of the BCS, otherwise a higher ranked team from another conference gets your spot.
I haven’t worked out all of the details (I just started thinking about this a few minutes ago), but the idea is to try to get the top ranked teams from 8 different conferences.
OK, so the question is, how far do we go to reach a conference champion? I went to 15, but I’m not willing to go to the 20’s to put the Big East in.
So, since we have a slot open, we go back to the top of the BCS rankings, and Stanford gets the 8th slot.
But they shouldn’t be seeded 8th. They should be seeded either where they fall in the rankings, or where they’re not going to face a conference foe until the championship game. In this case it works out anyway.
So, in our playoff (that will never happen because of the power of the bowl system but we can fantisize anyway) we have:
Auburn (SEC)
Oregon (Pac-10)
TCU (MWC)
Stanford (Pac-10)
Wisconsin (Big-10)
6.Oklahoma (Big 12)
Boise St. (WAC)
Virginia Tech (ACC)
So our quarterfinal round (1 vs. 8, 2 vs. 7…) is:
Auburn vs. Va Tech
Oregon vs. Boise St.
TCU vs. Oklahoma
Stanford vs. Wisconsin
Questions:
Can the Rose Bowl say “We’ll give up our spot in the rotation to take Stanford vs. Wisconsin”? That brings up this:
Do the 3 major bowls get to pick one of the quarterfinals to host? Or are other bowls hosting them? Or are they played at the site of the higher-ranked team?
Do we need to fudge with the seedings to make sure that 2 teams from the same conference don’t potentially meet until the final game? Or just let it ride?
How far in the rankings do we go looking for a unique conference chamption before saying “Sorry, you should have done better” and go back to the top of the rankings looking for “at large” teams? I picked 15 out of my ass, and that just happened to work out well for the ACC. I would be OK with anywhere from 10 to 20.
Are we looking for conference champions or just the highest ranking team in a conference? Usually these will be the same, but not always.