hammb wrote:Nathan again your post comes down to your one principal, and that is that a tournament champion is still not an undisputed champion. You continue to argue that those who lost in the tournament might lay claim to being the best team. That's ludicrous. Every major sport is decided by a tournament, and not once have I heard this complaint. If you want to be the best, you WIN OUT. Simple as that.
I'm not the one stating that college football revolves around having a national champion either, the country is. Ask around college football fans, many of them feel their team should compete for a national title on a semi-yearly basis, if they're fans of major BCS programs. If having a national title were not important we wouldn't have the BCS in the first place. We wouldn't even be talking about this if it weren't important to many people.
But I'm NOT a fan of a major conference team. And I thought this was supposed to be about everybody having a chance? If I'm a BGSU fan, I don't care about Ohio State, or Old Miss, etc. Plus, my team isn't going to win a title, so who the heck cares about a national tournament in my position? Nobody. If I were a major conference fan, or like many BGSU fans, somebody that follows a second team in such a conference, maybe I care about that race. In which case, why do we need a tournament anyway? By the end of the year, most teams have duplicated the function of a tournament, you have some teams left on the top, a bowl game pitts the "best" of them together, the title is given accordingly.
If not everybody thinks the team that won was the best, they are entitled to that view. It happens all the time in sports. Its not ludicrous, it is the way things are. Every other year, I hear a fan, or TV talking head say "well they won the tournament, but "Team X" is still the best team in the country overall." I hear the same thing in football every single year. I'm not saying somebody didn't win a tournament, just that some folks always think that winner isn't as good as another team.
Don't keep skipping over the point that we are talking about two different things, tournaments and titles. Sports-bar thinking says, "uh yeah, just win out man, thats how your the best." Boise just did that, they aren't the best. Why do we need to screw the world up with a tournament to prove the same thing? We don't.
hammb wrote:
Because of the illusion that you're there competing for the prize, which is the title. Sure you may have a million to one odds, but that's better odds than what we get right now.
Again, who the heck cares about a game, or if you are lucky, two games, that still leave you a loser, far removed from what you yourself say matters, a national title? Am I supposed to feel better because my team lost in the second round rather than the first, a thousand miles away in a game I can't go to, because I can't travel two weeks in a row? Give me a month to plan, let me have my bowl game, and equal odds of winning the game I go too, and I along with most people are happy.
hammb wrote:
And you're missing the point that the bowl games are equally as pointless as any tournament could ever be. The exist for the sole purpose of making some town money. That's it. Winning a bowl game looks good on a resume and whatnot for a coach, but in the end they're meaningless, unless its the one national championship game.
I didn't miss the point because there wasn't one to miss. The Bowl games do mean more. Alumni and development staffs are able to plan, events and activities around bowl games. They provide real value to the Unviersities, far more than a month of tournament games can. The players get the chance to ride high, enjoy themselves, worry about ONE game, not a bunch of them. Fans can plan around the game, enjoy it more. In the end, in our own case, we end the season with a victory and a good time. Not some mindless grind that ends with teams that were always going to get past us winning anyway.
I'm not interested in buying into some huge delussion about a tournament. This is NOT a pro league. You can't compare the Stanley Cup or the NFL, or even NCAA basketball to this. In almost every single way, it is a different animal.
In all cases, you are going to lose more trying to push a football tourney on this level than it is worth.
hammb wrote:
Pardon me for wanting that postseason game we get into to have the potential to mean something on a grander scale. Besides that I'd rather have us get drilled by 80 against USC in a game that is a stepping stone for a national title than beat NW in the Motor City bowl that even if we win our only reward is some congrats.
With due respect, I'm not really sure I have to debate your appearent desire to trade bowl wins for being the toilet paper for somebody that can actually win the national title. If there is anything more pointless than that, I can't think of it. Beating a team, any team, in a bowl game, and having the season end on that note, has much more meaning. You would have to be fixated with a national title to care about a tournament, and you would have to actually have a serious chance to win it for the games to mean anything.
No system that could called "fair" to all the conferences could ever be put into place. No system that could be made workable in terms of time and travel would be fair by the teams seeking to be in it. The only result would be to wreck the bowls which do provide a measure of success for fully half of their participants. A tournament only provides any real gain for one team, and at the expense of most of the division, it is not worth it.
