College Football Finally Is Getting a Playoff! Kind of.
Uncategorized July 17th. 2007, 3:31pm
College football is the only major sport that doesn’t conclude its season with a tournament, which is galling to say the least.
Until now! According to Lenn Robbins of the New York Post, a playoff is coming! In 2011! Maybe.
Under the new format, the top four teams would be seeded, probably using a voter/computer formula similar to the current BCS system and a sixth major bowl game would be created.
The four top-seeded teams would play in two “semifinal” games, using the existing bowls - Orange, Sugar, Rose, Fiesta and the current BCS title game on a rotating basis - with the two winners meeting in a newly created bowl. Theoretically, it would leave less argument over who’s No. 1.
Obviously this solves nothing; last year, we may have seen something like Florida vs. LSU and USC vs. Ohio State with the winners squaring off for the title. And sadly, Boise State would have been left out.
Wake us when if it happens.
A football final four (NY Post)
19 Responses to “College Football Finally Is Getting a Playoff! Kind of.”
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July 17th, 2007 at 3:48 pm
This solves a lot. Yea, maybe Boise St would have been left out but Florida would of killed them. This almost always guarantee the top two teams playing each other in the final game.
July 17th, 2007 at 3:55 pm
Ok, Florida would have killed Boise St. … but the way OSU played in the title game, who is to say the buckeyes would have whipped Boise St? A four team playoff, however, is an upgrade from the current format.
There will always be gripes, just as there are with the NCAA tournament.
July 17th, 2007 at 4:01 pm
There will always be somebody left out. No matter how many teams get selected for a tournament, there is a next best team. This is a step in the right direction
July 17th, 2007 at 4:05 pm
Is it really that much of an upgrade? Neither way proves who is the best team, unless we get one of them 40-point beatdowns.
Unless you consider the St. Louis Cardinals the best team in baseball last year, rather than a lucky team that got hot. Ditto half the NCAA basketball champs of the last 20 years.
On another note, why exactly would they need to add another bowl game? Wouldn’t the BCS Championship Game just be the championship game? I’d like to see the BCS Championship Game be the semifinal game, now that I think of it.
July 17th, 2007 at 4:09 pm
Bah. Four is plenty. If you can’t finish in the top four using whatever criteria everyone else has, you don’t deserve a shot.
Any more than four, and you start to devalue the regular season.
July 17th, 2007 at 4:15 pm
Agree with Brian.
July 17th, 2007 at 4:18 pm
Though, if you made it 8 teams, then you could have an extra week of games in mid-December. Remove some of those inane bowl games (sorry, Insight.com Bowl and Texas Bowl) and replace them with a game from this tournament in December.
July 17th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
It is a step in the right direction, although it would be a lot more fun if it was the top 8 teams, but what can you do. This is better than nothing, and more importantly, better than the mind-numbingly awful current system.
July 17th, 2007 at 4:21 pm
I’ve been spouting about my own playoff format for years, the gist of which is this: all BCS conference winners +2 at-larges (ala a Boise State) get in. No strength of schedule, no computer rankings, and best of all, no more teams that can’t win their conference but somehow get crowned national champs.
That said, 4 teams is a good start…as long as my beloved Gators are one of the 4.
July 17th, 2007 at 4:24 pm
You are so stupid. It is not perfect, but it is leaps and bounds better than the current system.
July 17th, 2007 at 4:30 pm
“Obviously this solves nothing; last year, we may have seen something like Florida vs. LSU and USC vs. Ohio State with the winners squaring off for the title. And sadly, Boise State would have been left out.”
Actually as the article points out (http://www.nypost.com/seven/07172007/photos/sports068.jpg), USC wouldnt even have been involved with the way the BCS rankings stood before the bowls. Lets not kid around either. Boise State would not have pulled of TWO miracles to win the natl title either. This is an improvement for the fans, but like all things in life, there are negatives. Id take that set up though.
July 17th, 2007 at 4:37 pm
You can make a case that most of the last 20 years of the NCAA tourney the best team or top 5 team during the regular season DID win..the only abberrations I can think of are 2006 Florida ( but they backed it up in 07) 2003 Syracuse 97 Arizona, 91 Duke and 88 Kansas..Thats a pretty good percentage for the last 20 years..I like this playoff structure..You would have gotten two great semis and a good final with the final teams not having 9000 days off..Also it would have been OSU-Michigan and Florida-LSU..just nitpicking..
July 17th, 2007 at 4:43 pm
Brian is right — four is enough. There will always be some teams “left out.” TBL, how does it “solve nothing”?
BSU didn’t deserve to be in a theoretical Top 4 last year anyway. I don’t understand all the slurping over this team. Wow, you beat one pretty good team, in OU, by a single point. Congratulations. That alone does not guarantee you a shot at the title.
And is there a reason they have to wait until 2011? Too lazy to read the link.
July 17th, 2007 at 5:01 pm
rs27: I think one difference is that big upsets (where one school is smaller and has less overall talent) are much less likely in football than in basketball. In basketball, one player can much more easily dictate the outcome of a single game. In football, the deeper team filled with better athletes usually wins out. Seemingly every Saturday, some top-20 team is losing 14-3 to a no-name school, but wins 45-17 after a huge second half, once the other team’s starters get tired.
A four team playoff is better than none–I’d rather have arguments about the 4th and 5th best teams than about the 2nd and 3rd.
July 17th, 2007 at 5:30 pm
I think 2011 is when TV contracts and so forth expire.
July 17th, 2007 at 6:45 pm
Mike:
Do you watch football or just look at some scores on Saturday night? That was an Oklahoma team that was Big XII champions would have been in the national title discussion had it not been for the Oregon debacle. Boise handled them in the first half and OU needed a fluky TO on a punt to get back in the game. Otherwise, Boise probably wins by 10 in regulation. Is there anything they could have done to convince you they were a top 5 football team?
July 17th, 2007 at 6:49 pm
There are six BCS conferences. Take the top two teams from each conference, and say, the champions of Conference USA, the WAC, MAC and Mountain West. Or, instead of the C-USA, and to appease NBC and every other bandwagon fan in the country, keep a spot reserved for Notre Dame, since they feel they deserve special treatment(or better yet, force them to join a conference). There’s your 16 teams. No mess, no fuss…
July 17th, 2007 at 8:49 pm
In addition to the win over Oklahoma, Boise State also beat Oregon State (which won 10 games and beat USC) by 4 touchdowns and Hawaii (which won 11 games).
Having said that, no tournament “guarantees” that the best team wins. The results of one game are not a reliable indicator that the winner is superior to the loser, even if the margin of victory is wide. Just because USC trounced Oklahoma, 55-19, in the BCS title game in January 2005, it didn’t *necessarily* mean that USC was objectively better. If they had played ten times, you might have had two USC blowouts, two Oklahoma blowouts and six close games. Or you could have had several games like the one that was actually played. We can never know.
The point is that we don’t set out to identify the “best” team– a nebulous concept that can only be reliably determined by a large sample size of head-to-head matchups that is impossible in a college or pro football season. The goal is to determine a champion. Over 162 games last year, the Mets seemed pretty clearly to be the “best” team in the N.L. (nine games better than the next-best record), but they did not become champions. Being the “best” was no consolation.
So, we need to let go of the fallacy that we’re determining the “best” team and just have a system where everyone has a fair and equal chance to become champion, such as those proposed above in which conference champions play off for the title. Consequently, we need a system in which every team has an equal chance to win its conference championship. For example, last year, Wisconsin did not get to play Ohio State. Every conference should emulate the Pac-10 and Big East, requiring every team to play every conference opponent. The SEC and Big Ten do not schedule this way now because they don’t want to risk additional losses for their teams that might keep them out of the BCS. A system in which only conference champions get to play off for the title would make this concern moot.
July 17th, 2007 at 9:06 pm
Tim Tebow didn’t give f*ck then, he doesn’t give a f*ck now.