Post-season Play-offs

[Spence]

Yeofoot -- SHHHH.

CLF, How is taking the top 10 teams in the country unfair? Seems to me that would be the ONLY fair way to do a play-off.

Does he really have a Caddy? Man, I hope that is a joke because the NCAA does a lot of sniffing around a championship team. Some reporter will live on the Texas campus looking to make a name for himself this off season. Those guys will follow anything.

[Jason G]

I agree with a lot of CLF's points here. I think if there is a playoff every conference champion should get in. I don't see why a 12-16 team (depending on number of first round byes, if any) playoff coulldn't include every conference champ plus a few wild cards as it is done in the NFL. I'd even like to see the seeding done the same way with conference champs being seeded ahead of the wild cards.

I know many of you have argued that schools from some conferences have no business being in a playoff. My reply to that is that if every conference has a tie in to the national tournament then there is a realistic chance for every team to have something to play for. In my opinion, this is one of the things that hurts recruiting in the non-BCS conferences now. In the current system they are not given an equal chance. What type of a blue chip prospect wants to go to a school that has little or no chance to play for much at the end of the season? If every conference gets representation you are more likely to have better players end up at schools in leagues like C-USA, the WAC, MWC, MAC, and even Sun Belt.

Thus the "crappy" leagues, as it was put earlier in this thread, would become less so and in the process create a more equal playing field throughout all of the college football landscape.

The problem with simply taking teams based on rankings is who is doing the ranking. Opinions vary widely on where teams should be ranked. The computer polls rely on strength of schedule which penalizes some teams because of nothing more than their league affiliation. The human\ media polls always fall toward those schools that have garnered the most attention and publicity, whether it is deserved or not. Plus, you can spend money to gain publicity as well. The human polls are more subject to corruption.

There is no easy answer to how a playoff should be run but I think it would need to be fair to all in 1-A and that the conference scenario would be in the best long-term interest of the sport. For now, though, I will continue to support the bowl system, even though I do believe the BCS is flawed. At least the BCS is better than the way it was done when it was just the coaches and media polls.

[Eric]

Just a quick recap of my points:

1. What Yeofoot said

2. "Student athlete"-no point in playing, and playing, and playing, 1 game is enough for a playoff in college

3. Makes college football unique

4. Makes the regular season that much more special

5. Upsets happen, and this system actually gives us the 2 best teams in the country. The only fair way to decide a playoff would have to be to play best-of-7 game series, and that's impossible in football

5. The players are pretty much tourists. They have a good time taking part in the off of the field activities.

[Spence]

The problem with simply taking teams based on rankings is who is doing the ranking. Opinions vary widely on where teams should be ranked. The computer polls rely on strength of schedule which penalizes some teams because of nothing more than their league affiliation. The human\ media polls always fall toward those schools that have garnered the most attention and publicity, whether it is deserved or not. Plus, you can spend money to gain publicity as well. The human polls are more subject to corruption.

If you go just by conference winners and say Texas is #1 and Oklahoma is #2 with 1 loss to Texas, how wrong would it be for the Sunbelt champ to have Oklahoma's spot. If you think the current system is flawed try telling the Sooners why they don't belong in the play-off. That system would be full of controversy. It would be an absolute joke of a system.

[Yeofoot]

I think one of the biggest obstacles in deciding how to do a playoff system, is philisophically what is our objective?

Is it our #1 and only priority to have an undisputed national champion?


Do we want to make sure that if a team is the best in the country on January 4th, they are given a shot to play even if they are not one of the 8 best on December 4th? (This is under the theory that teams get better)

Do we want to make sure that teams that are the not the best but better than the contenders get to play?

Do we want to have the most amount of quality football games played?

Do we want to make the most teams happy?

Do we want to make the most fans happy?

I like the bowl system. With the playoffs, only one team ends the season on a high note. With the bowls, half of the winning teams in the country end the season with a win.

[Yeofoot]

No matter what they do with playoffs or BCS, is keep the automatic bid for the national champs. If you take that away, then you take the incentive away from having big game matchups like Texas vs. OSU, whoever loses that game can still go BCS because they can still win the conference. It also makes both teams more capable of winning their conference because playing a good team makes you better.

[colorado_loves_football]

Spence, I never said taking the top ten wasn't fair, I said I disagree with how teams are selected by rank, without respect to their conference affiliation. I thought we had already covered that pretty well.
Top ten is subjective no matter how you look at it. W.Virginia wasn't ranked top-10, so wouldn't be included in next year's pairings if that was the standard, neither would TCU nor FSU, so I think that's already sufficient argument for why it shouldn't be utilized.
Secondly, I was trying to get away from ranking altogether if possible, with respect to how teams are selected. And one way to do that is through a conference champoinship game.
Ten conferences equally divided gives the BCS a ten-team field. If you don't believe me, divide 119/10. We're short one team, but W.Kentucky will soon be joining the Sun Belt in football, with plans for more in the future. One way to put the 'skids' on that, would be to require every conference to have a conference championship game. (yes, it would be fair).
You refer to Texas-OU. Well, if you read my proposal through, you would see that they would play in separate divisions, so the Red River Shootout, wouldn't preclude Texas (or OU) from participating. But yes, one would have to sit out, unless an exception were made.
I'm not proposing making the BCS less accessible to teams, in fact I think I'm proposing the opposite.
Presently there are some 65 teams given 'direct' representation to the BCS. Why not make that 119? I'm not being facetious here. I'ts possible to have every team represented in next year's BCS, through direct conferece selection, and it would be fair.
And it would still give the BCS the 'championship' pairing it wants.
If a team can't win it's conference should it be in the title game? OU was but I think it's fair to say that won't happen again, (at least I hope not).
So, awarding a team a BCS 'bid' through conference affiliation in one fair way to select teams, irrespective of a ranking.
At present I have to agree the Sun-Belt isnt' deservng of a bid. A conference has to meet minimal qualifying standards, which I propose to be the same as applied to Notre Dame, 9 wins.
That would have prevented Tulsa, along with Akron, this year from participating. And in that event a ranking could be utilized to fill the 'at large' slots. But to discriminate solely upon where a team is located I think is bias, and ought not be the standard by which teams are selected.
The biggest debate so far is about how the BCS selects teams.
Last year Utah finally broke into it, through BCS ranking. This year TCU made a gallant effort to 'break in' but weren't selected. Maybe there shouldn't be a spot 'reserved' for a traditionally non-BCS team, as there need to be standards, but to deny a legitimate team a spot is unethical.
This year I'll agree TCU probably wasn't good enough to secure a bid in the BCS, but they were pretty darn close!
Next year, they ought to at least be given serious consideration (or which ever team has sufficient claim upon it).
A 'ranking' is subjective. Perhaps a spot (or two) ought to be 'set aside' for those teams ranked sufficiently high enough to merit consideration.
But to award every bid on ranking alone, I believe is unethical.

[Guest]

I could care less about all the other sports anyway, can't we just have a huge playoff that lasts all year? Triple Elimination. Every team in the country can have a shot.

I"m not familiar with triple elimination, but a double elimination bracket would go as follows:
64 team 32-32-16-16-8-8-4-2-1, so i'm assuming for 120 teams it would have the following pattern: 60-60-60-32-32-32-16-16-16-8-8-8-4-2-1
Someone can check that out, if they want. But that would be a 15 game playoff, long enough to last all year long.

[Yeofoot]

I was being facetious, but that sounds good!

[colorado_loves_football]

There's an article in Sports Illustrated (URL not available)
December Madness, by Tim Layden, Sports Illustrated, Jan 9, 2006
Technically, the Bowl Championship Series worked just fine this year. When USC and Texas hashed things out in the Rose Bowl on Wednesday night (page 36), they were the only two teams who could legitimately say they deserved to be playing of the national championship, the first time a college football season had reached such a satisfying resolution in three years. There were no powerhouses griping that they'd been snubbed (see the Trojans two seasons ago and undefeated Auburn last year), no mid-major upstarts crying foul over the BCS's prejudice against small conferences. And the postseason matchups were, for the most part, entertaining. Boise State's fourth-quarter comeback against Boston College on the Blue turf in the MPC Computers Bowl was good stuff. UCLA and Northwestern were expected to hang up a bunch of points, and the Bruin's 50-38 victory in the Sun Bowl didn't disappoint. Penn State's 26-23 win over Florida State in the nearly five-hour orange Bowl shank-o-rama was unattractive, but it was an emotional clash between two coaching titans.
But of course the BCS bar has been lowered so far that even when the system works, it doesn't. For all their great moments, most of the bowl games were short trips to nowhere, a lot of sound and fury signifying how much better December would be i if college football had a March madness-style playoff. As things stand now, the BCS's title match hogs so much of the attention that it renders insignificant all other bowl games. (Except, of course in year when there are more than two unbeaten teams, and then it underscores the meaningless of all that year' bowls.) The non-BCS games? They are something less than insignificant and the teams playing in them often show that they know it. Oregon didn't lose to Oklahoma in the Holiday Bowl because the Sooners were the better team; the 10-2 Ducks lost because they were left out of the BCS and treated the Holiday Bowl like leftovers.
The bowl season, once a clutch of holiday presents nestled between Christmas and new Year's Day, is now a numbingly relentless 28-game assault that begins shortly after the Heisman Trophy is awarded and ends in the middle of the first week of January. Tradition, the soul of college football has been abandoned, and Jan. 1 (or Jan. 2, if the former happens to fall on NFL Sunday) is no longer sacrosanct. The rhythms of the new bowl season didn't match the rhythms of fans's lives. The national championship game unfolds each year in mind-week after New Year's Day, a prime-time TV show that ends long after most kids (and adults) have gone to bed - and long after the Christmas tree has been left outside in a snowbank.
The BCS endures-and the idea of a playoff languishes- because of another tradition: greed. The basketball bracketfest has a $565 million per year TV contract but that money is split among more than 300 schools across the country. The BCS, meanwhile, is ruled by the lords of the six major conferences plus Notre Dame (SI, Nov. 29, 2004).
Sure, there are the occasional bones tossed to the Mountain Wests and MAC's of the worlds, but the commisioners of the Big Ten, Pac-10, SEC, Big 12, ACC and Big East (and the Fighting Irish) control the sport and the $96 million the BCS is expected to generate this year. They're not likely to agree to a playoff that opens the party to every team in the country.
The commishes are backed by the college presidents, who lamely argue that a playoff would distract players from their studies and erode the academic intergrity of the sport. That argument, which they manage to present with a straight face, doesn't' seem apply to hoops player who take most of March off from school- but they've drawn a lind in the gridiron.
That's too bad,because a playoff would make the postseason more like the regular season, when almost every game feels like Armageddon. The top teams' seasons are on the line every weekend from Labor Day to Thanksgiving. One loss dents any team's long-term hopes; two losses can be crippling. That thrilling sense of urgency is what separates college football from every other major sport.
It's also what is largely missing from the bowl season. if college football is going to go depart from tradition, let it be for something better. Imagine if Ohio State's victory over Notre Dame in the Fiesta Bowl had earned the Buckeyes something more than a trophy. Like, say, a rematch with Texas or a shot at USC? Imagine Penn State's speedy defense lining up to stop Pat White and the West Virginia spread offense, with a trip to the national semi-finals on the line. Imagine a post-season in which the games matter to those who don't work in conference accounting offices. It may be an impossible dream, but it's a worthy one. (reprinted with permission).

[Spence]

CLF, this may be your best post ever. This also pretty much says why they will never have a play-off in CFB.

That's too bad,because a playoff would make the postseason more like the regular season, when almost every game feels like Armageddon. The top teams' seasons are on the line every weekend from Labor Day to Thanksgiving. One loss dents any team's long-term hopes; two losses can be crippling. That thrilling sense of urgency is what separates college football from every other major sport.

I play-off would take away the since of urgency from the regular season. this guy says it wouldn't, but I believe it would take away the meaning of the regular season and the CFB regular season is what sets CFB apart from every other sport.

College football does have a play-off and it starts in September. Every single game in every single week of the season matters. If you lose, even more then once, you are playing out the rest of the season to get better for next year. This is why I love college football and why I only pay attention to basketball in March.

[colorado_loves_football]

College football does have a play-off and it starts in September. Every single game in every single week of the season matters. If you lose, even more then once, you are playing out the rest of the season to get better for next year. This is why I love college football and why I only pay attention to basketball in March.

It's possible I suppose a playoff would create as many problems as it solves, but if you consider my proposal, whereby a team is either admitted or not, depending on how they fare in a confernece title arrangement, that would include regular season results. So, it's sort of a 'best of both worlds' arrangment, for BCS teams, as well as for those that aren't traditionally part of the BCS, assuming they meet all criteria, which I believe ought to include a conference title.
A 'Final Four' would pare down the BCS field to four. I think it's a logical resolution to selecting a concensus national champion, every year.

[Spence]

t's possible I suppose a playoff would create as many problems as it solves, but if you consider my proposal, whereby a team is either admitted or not, depending on how they fare in a confernece title arrangement, that would include regular season results.

No one would ever take seriously a playoff that could possibly exclude the #2 team in the country. It could happen. Oklahoma lost to K-State in 2003, and lossed their conference, but only fell to #2. Would you consider that a fair situation? Would it be right that North Texas goes and Oklahoma(@#2) doesn't. That wouldn't stir up any controversy. Everyone would be all right with that. Yeah right.

[colorado_loves_football]

Spence I'm not proposing that 'Robin Hood' be used to assure that the BCS is organized fairly. All I'm suggesting is that every conference have an opportunity to participate, not an unreasonable request, really.
This is I-A football, for all intents-and-purposes, everyone is expected to play to a certain standard otherwise they don't belong. Sure someone could make an argument against any one conference, but if they can't compete they don't belong in I-A, and therefore ought to consider participating at the I-AA level.
If your objection is that the quality of play is necessarily 'lower' in say, the Sun Belt Conference, I can only say, that's something competition ought to address. It's my opinion, that in general many teams are playing at a higher level, overall than in previous years, so to deny a conference a 'bid' solely due to their history is biased, and unfair.
That being said, a standard needs to be introduced so that no team can be 'unfairly' represented in the BCS. This year, Arkansas State won the Sun-Belt, 6-5 overall. If the same 'standard' applied to Notre Dame were applied to every 'non-BCS' team, they wouldn't qualify, neither would Tulsa, or Akron. And a hypothetical 'confernece' championship between Boise St. and TCU would select one deserving 'candidate' in this year's BCS.
Next year, more teams will be allowed to participate, so the standard might be 'lowered' to reflect that. Even this year, FSU qualified with an 8-4 record, so maybe that standard ought to be applied (8 wins). That would have allowed both Tulsa and TCU/Boise St. to participate.
And that would have still allowed two 'at large' selections in this year's BCS, namely Ohio State and Notre Dame.

[Spence]

If your saying that the end always justifies the means, I don't buy it. Robbing from the rich and giving to the poor is still stealing.