Would anybody not love this?

Jacobs4Heisman · Post by **Jacobs4Heisman** » Mon Dec 04, 2006 4:33 pm

Until you have a 16 team playoff, you won't get anything the majority would deem "fair". You'll still have folks arguing about the last team in, but #17 sure has less of an argument than #3 in the current system.

Unless there are exactly 2 undefeated powerhouses left at the end of the year, the BCS is designed to fail. The BCS should be a tool, much like the RPI.

Another change I would make to the landsape, is to require every conference to have a championship game, or do away with all championship games.

hammb · Post by **hammb** » Mon Dec 04, 2006 4:48 pm

I would require championship games at every conference, and shrink the regular schedule to either 10 or 11 games.

Bleeding Orange · Post by **Bleeding Orange** » Mon Dec 04, 2006 9:55 pm

Warthog wrote:What if OSU would win; USC beats Michigan; Boise, Wisconsin, and Louisville all lose. Then you get an undefeated team playing a two loss team for the title. How does that solve anything? Or even better, Boise wins and gets to play Ohio State for the title. Maybe then the Earth would split open and the BCS folks would scream the system is unfair.

Based on your combination of emoticons I can't tell if you are joking or not. But in this case, at least the two teams playing for a national championship earned their way to the game, and other teams were given a fair and legitimate shot at them. In a playoff system it really doesn't matter what the records of the two teams playing for a NC are - thats the beauty of it.

Warthog · Post by **Warthog** » Mon Dec 04, 2006 10:40 pm

I was joking around with the goofy "and 1" scenario. The first being a joke where an undefeated team would be forced to play the best two loss team for the title. The second scenario was having an undefeated mid-major getting a shot at the national championship. With the first scenario, the undefeated team would being saying the system isn't fair, especially if they lost. With the second scenario, all the other BCS teams would be crying foul because the system is designed to make sure a non-BCS team can't win the title.

Bleeding Orange · Post by **Bleeding Orange** » Mon Dec 04, 2006 11:00 pm

Warthog wrote:I was joking around with the goofy "and 1" scenario. The first being a joke where an undefeated team would be forced to play the best two loss team for the title. The second scenario was having an undefeated mid-major getting a shot at the national championship. With the first scenario, the undefeated team would being saying the system isn't fair, especially if they lost. With the second scenario, all the other BCS teams would be crying foul because the system is designed to make sure a non-BCS team can't win the title.

Gotcha. Sorry for the mix-up. Methinks I was a victim of an "emoticon deke."

Lord_Byron · Post by **Lord_Byron** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 7:01 am

I kind of like things the way they are. Sports are supposed to be fun and I enjoy the discussions around who is number one and who 'deserves' to be in which game.

D 1A football is the only sport where there are regular season games early in the season that have huge implications. I like that in the same way that the NCAA hoops tourney was better when there were only 48 invites. The regular season was more interesting.

hammb · Post by **hammb** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 9:08 am

Lord_Byron wrote:I kind of like things the way they are. Sports are supposed to be fun and I enjoy the discussions around who is number one and who 'deserves' to be in which game.

D 1A football is the only sport where there are regular season games early in the season that have huge implications. I like that in the same way that the NCAA hoops tourney was better when there were only 48 invites. The regular season was more interesting.

The problem with the thoughts that, "the regular season means more." is that it only applies to those teams who have not lost yet. Texas, for instance, lost an early game to OSU, and nobody talked about them for the rest of the season. They lost another game to make that moot, but would we have heard about them, even if they had won out? Doubt it.

Yeah, every game has huge implications, but the reality is that if you're seeking a national title as soon as you lose a single game the rest of your season is essentially meaningless.

In a 16 team playoff scenario with only 5 at large bids you're still making the regular season pretty important. You either win your conference or you must have a pretty good resume to be in the top 5 remaining teams.

To look at it a little differently a 16 team playoff would be like 13% would make the playoffs. In the NFL 37% make the playoffs. In Baseball (widely considered the msot difficult sport to make the playoffs) 26% of the teams make the playoffs.

When you factor in that some of those conference champions will not be in the top 13%, you're basically telling teams that they must be in the top 10% of college football to make the tournament. Seems to me that still makes the regular season pretty important. I mean look at what J4H was saying. Teams like WVU & Rutgers would not make the playoff in this scenario. They had pretty good regular seasons, but sputtered towards the end. Their regular season still had pretty good meaning, even in this 16 team scenario.

Jacobs4Heisman · Post by **Jacobs4Heisman** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 10:33 am

I think the quality of regular season College football is decreased because of the way things are set up now. Stay with me here.

You're a college football player at Oklahoma. You know, right off the bat, that one loss means you're probably eliminated from nat'l title contention. So there's already a ton of pressure on you. You drop a heartbreaker to Oregon in which you were raped by the officials, and bye-bye season. There are a lot of college athletes that don't respond all that well to intense pressure for 12-13 straight games. The result I think is a lot of sloppy games throughout the year due to the constant pressure.

You're a college basketball player at Oklahoma. You drop an early season nail-biter at Kentucky. Sure it still hurts, but big deal -- you're a better player and team because of it. You know you still have a chance to play your way into the tourney. You don't feel nearly as much pressure to win every single game, and you can just focus on getting better. I think this leads to a higher quality sporting event more consistently.

Which athlete do you think enjoys his playing experience more? I think if we went to a 16 team playoff, you'd see more marquis OOC matchups ala OSU-Texas, and I think you'd see a higher quality of football due to a small decrease in pressure.

And it would still be incredibly tough to get in. I don't think the regular season loses much interest at all. I think it would gain interest because of the importance placed back on winning your conference. Nobody nationally paid attention to the WVU-Rutgers game this year, because both teams were out of championship contention. That game was an awesome game that had huge implications in the big-least. It would have had ten times the interest in the playoff scenario.

NWLB · Post by **NWLB** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 8:28 pm

The longer people debate what kind of a system would “work” the more the entire argument slowly pulls apart.

All a tourney would do is create another title, which still won't put the debate of who is best to bed better than what we have now. And we already gets lots of extra football without a tourney. The regular season does only mean something to those with something left to play for, to an extent anyway. A tourney only dilutes the regular season.

In any case, it won't and shouldn't happen, so I don't worry much about it. Half the people pointing to the USC/UM/UF topic as a reason why we somehow need a tourney still can't really seem to get a grip on why it helps their point of view. The new media line this year is “call the regular season what you want, but its not a playoff.” The new line is right, but does utterly nothing to advance any view that a tourney is needed.

Net result, nobody is marching in the street, there is no ground swell, and the topic is effectively dead for years to come.

NWLB · Post by **NWLB** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 8:39 pm

And as for conference champions having an auto-bid, I'm against it. I don't think Boise, CMU, or half the conference title holders are good enough to warrant consideration as the “best.” Get past that point, and then you get into how many teams from what conference should be in a tourney of any size, and the slippery slope has been reached. Who should get two, or one, or none. Seems very much like what we have right now.

Warthog · Post by **Warthog** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 10:30 pm

NWLB wrote:And as for conference champions having an auto-bid, I'm against it. I don't think Boise, CMU, or half the conference title holders are good enough to warrant consideration as the “best.”

I will disagree. If you are going to hold a playoff to determine a champion, then you need to, in some respect, include all teams in that level of competition. That is, all Div I-A schools deserve a shot to participate in the playoff. If not, what is the point of the MAC, WAC, Mtn West, etc. of being I-A?

kdog27 · Post by **kdog27** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 10:49 pm

Warthog wrote: If not, what is the point of the MAC, WAC, Mtn West, etc. of being I-A?

Exactly. Every team has a chance at week one this way.

NWLB · Post by **NWLB** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 11:02 pm

The point didn't have anything to do with national titles, it had to do with playing the games. Everything else came afterwards. The last I checked those teams were playing to win their weekly games first, the conference second, a bowl game third, and if people thought they were good, they wound up ranked.

kdog27 · Post by **kdog27** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 11:09 pm

NWLB wrote:The point didn't have anything to do with national titles, it had to do with playing the games. Everything else came afterwards. The last I checked those teams were playing to win their weekly games first, the conference second, a bowl game third, and if people thought they were good, they wound up ranked.

Tell that to Utah in 2004.

NWLB · Post by **NWLB** » Tue Dec 05, 2006 11:11 pm

And Utah won the national title.......when? Ah, wait, they didn't.