DebAte-T-Q: Should College Football Install a Playoff?

godaddy.com cares.

it’d at least match and likely greatly surpass whatever bowl game it was replacing.

I highly doubt that especially if it was a second round game and many fans had already shelled out to go to the first round game.

You’d only make the "other bowl" games less meaningful which would have an even harder time selling out.

And this is a problem because…?

More meaningful football games will get more attendance. Less meaningful football games will get less attendance. Games in great locations will get great attendance. A playoff would shift to some degree where those priorities lie, just like the BCS did.

Why can’t I figure out how to respond to you with another question?

Exactly.

Doesn’t the BCS already do that by taking the top 10? How is limiting that by 2 teams and making those 8 teams play 3 more games mean we’re getting that better football. Sure we’re getting to see the top 8 teams play 3-4 more weeks, but that doesn’t mean it will be good football.

Anyone really think Oregon was playing their best football in the NCG last year? Anyone want to venture to guess what their level of play would have been like if they had to play 3 more games? Especially if we had to do it RIGHT after the Civil War when LMJ and so many of our players were banged up.

I’m not saying that it couldn’t be done the right way. I’m saying it wouldn’t be the right way.

I disagree with this, or I would if I had faith that they’d institute the proper methodology right away and not mess with it.

The regular season would be crucial for seeding under the Dan Wetzel scenario in DTTBCS. A team that’s 10-0 could not coast through the last two games, because their overall seeding is how home field advantage would be determined in the playoffs.

You think LSU wouldn’t have an incentive to keep their record looking good during the last couple of weeks of the year in order to get a home game?

It’s different in the NFL — once you’ve locked up home field for the playoffs you can afford to risk a loss and rest players. A team in a college playoff situation, if set up right (which it wouldn’t be, my argument against doing it) would get clobbered in the polls if they tanked a game and could lose any home field.

So, two out of three?

I see the risk of potentially making the regular season less valuable, more player injuries, more disruption to the student athlete system, less media money for regular season games (since less valuable), more irrelevance for the minor bowls and thereby less money overall too great for a potential little less controversy on who the National champ is or maybe a few more “good” football games.

As I said in my post:

The only way to make it work is if you recreated 8 conferences with the same number of teams, with the same OOC schedules, and the same conference championship requirements.

If the NCAA wants to implement this, I’ll be first in line. Anything else is going to be just a patch or evolution of what we’ve done in the past and the rewards seem to small for the risks of what we might lose. I know it’s apples and oranges, but the rewards of going to a 96 team NCAA bball tourney do not out weigh the risks, no matter how much people try and convince me that more tourney games will be “better.”

is when you’re deciding between #2 and #3 you’ll pin it down to one thing (a late assignment, an outburst in class, an extra absence, etc). You have to narrow it down to one thing that’s going to separate those top 2 from the rest.

When you’re analyzing #3-20 there are too muddied variables that the difference between those that you’re letting in and those you’re excluding becomes complicated and leaves too much room for criticism or varied interpretation. #17 is going to have a pretty good argument and correlate well to someone that got in and should be included versus #14, 15 or 16, whereas if you’re explicit at the beginning #3 might not like it, but their going to understand why they didn’t get in.

Or, look at it like this: Isn’t it easier to pick the two kids you like the most out of a class than the sixteen you like the most?

You really have to start splitting hairs when you get past 12. And inevitably kids #17 and 18 are going to feel shat upon.. whereas most of the kids know who’s most likely to get picked 1 and 2. And the disappointment is diluted significantly among the other kids.

You’ll never eliminate the pissing and moaning. It’s just that it’s easier for the rest of the world to look with pity and derision at the poor little #9 team that swears it’s better than the #8 team that got in.

For the love of Pete, every single fucking year we hear pissing and moaning from teams that don’t make it into a 66 TEAM TOURNAMENT.

This problem would go away if the media would just stop covering the pissers and moaners.

We have a constitutional right to whine.

It doesn’t matter if your playoff is 2 or 4 or 8 or 16. If you’re seeded #1 in a 8-teamer, having gone 12-0 and blistered everybody in your path, and through a combination of bad luck and clusterfuck find yourself on the losing end in the first round, maybe by a bad call or the team coming down with e.coli, you’re still going to make up your shirts and moan about the travesty that your team had to play the riffraff when they could have been resting up for the NCG that, had the tournament not been around, you would have certainly been in.

I see your argument regarding 8 vs 16. Which is why I like the concept of realigning the CFB world into 8 conferences. There are your 8 teams, and fuck Notre Dame and the service academies if they don’t want to join.

And when was the last time a #7 team in a final poll suffered high indignation for not being called #1? I must have slept through that season.

However, its pretty clear that the probability of getting 100% of the top 2 right in a 2 team system is astronomically lower than that of the top 2 teams making it into a field of 16, far far lower than that of the top 2 making it into a field of 8, and significantly lower than that of the top 2 making it into a field of 4 (take your pick of playoff size). So the very best (and better) teams are less likely to get screwed, the larger the playoff number gets.

That’s awesome, we should let 120 teams into the playoff because then we’re DEFINITELY not excluding that 1 team that might have a significant chance at winning the oh so important National Championship.

I get that you can come up with arbitrary numbers like 60-70% accuracy with a 1 or 2 team designated championship, and by your own admission, usually it’s somewhere in the 3-4 team selection process that we have a true “best team,” so why not go with a 4 team playoff? Because then you’d have even more hissy fits from the conference champs that didn’t get a shot and we’d have the entire “transitive property of college football” argument ad nauseum. Think back to 2009 when we had 5 undefeated teams but 3 of them were Cinci, TCU and fBSU. Picking the top 4 would have been damn near impossible.

So instead we jump to the 8 team playoff to avoid years like that because math and symmetry of games works against us and we want to limit the amount of bitterness and whining from those that were left out. Unfortunately now we’re dealing with extended seasons, added injuries, discrepancies in seeding, record and schedule inequality and all those things than a 120, 64, 32 or even 16 team playoff possess at an infinite level. Unfortunately, now you’ve tipped the scale from not inclusive enough to too inclusive with just a simple move.

Fucking math.

Wouldn’t it be great if we could just arbitrarily pick the number of teams that “should” be in the playoff each year, and not have to deal with consistent numbers that leads to 30-40% incorrect selections each year? So in 2009 we’d have 5 teams, in 2010 we’d have 3, and so on and so forth. Too bad logistics and tradition and math get in the way of making that possible.

Instead we’re either going to have to blow the whole thing up and realign the entire FBS or deal with a fallible system. If we’re dealing with a fallible system, then the only thing we’re really arguing about is degrees of fallibility.

It reminds me of a joke:

A man walks into a bar and finds the prettiest girl. He walks up to her and says, “would you sleep with me if I gave you $1,000,000?” She replies, “Of course!” He responds, “How about I give $50 for a blow job?” She says, “What do you think I am, a whore?” He says, “We’ve already established what you are, now we’re just haggling over price.”

We’ve already established that college football fans are whores. Now we’re only haggling over how much fallibility fans are willing to except.

We are getting into a somewhat different debate, but that is okay.

The only other solution is to restructure to 8 conferences, which is about as likely to happen in the next 10 years as the events detailed in the movie 2012. I’m trying to give a practical application. Not one that exists in fantasy land, consequently, I’m not trying to get a “perfect” post-season system – just a better one than what we have.

Can anyone really make a legitimate claim that Boise State didn’t belong there more than Georgia Tech? One did everything they could, the other one didn’t. They even beat another team that “made it”, despite them having 2 losses. There is no practical possibility of having more than 8 undefeated teams in the country. Every undefeated team should be allowed to have a chance, but just because you go undefeated does not mean you will be a top-half seed.