PLAY-offs?!?!?! (/jim_mora)

If you have a D-I A (or D-I bowl subdivision as the NCAA now calls it) playoff and its 16 teams, you better have a representative from each of the conferences. That would leave five at-large bids.

 

Take the BCS final standings and seed the bracket for a 16-team playoff. Almost every first-round matchup offers terrific fan interest, like 16 Rutgers vs. Ohio State, or 11 Notre Dame and 6 Louisville.
Maybe Mr. Murdoch, the sport's new partner, sees this. I hope so.

 

I'd also do a 16-team playoff, but do it like the NCAA does with basketball and give each Division I-A conference champion an automatic bid, then fill out the bracket with at-large teams.

No conference can have more than 3 teams in the tournament. Teams from the same conference can't face eachother in the first 2 rounds.

The BCS standings are used to select the at-large teams and seed them.

Here is what I have for first-round pairings:

#1 Ohio State (BIG 10) vs. #16 Troy (SUN BELT)
#8 Boise State (WAC) vs. #9 Auburn (AT-LARGE)
#4 LSU (AT-LARGE) vs. #13 BYU (MTN WEST)
#5 Southern Cal (PAC 10) vs. #12 Wake Forest (ACC)
#2 Florida (SEC) vs. #15 Central Michigan (MAC)
#7 Wisconsin (AT-LARGE) vs. #10 Oklahoma (BIG 12)
#3 Michigan (AT-LARGE) vs. #14 Houston (CONF. USA)
#6 Louisville (BIG EAST) vs. #11 Notre Dame (AT-LARGE)

End the regular season (including conference championship game) on Thanksgiving weekend. Play the first two rounds at the higher seed's home field the first and second weekend of December. Play the semifinal games in pre-designated bowl games (say, the Rose and Fiesta) on New Year's Day while assigning those who didn't get tournament bids or who were already eliminated to the other bowl games. The semifinal winners then return a week after New Year's to play one last game for the national championship.

 

Boise State has to get a spot in a playoff, even if it is only four teams. You can't claim you are going to decide the championship on the field and leave out an undefeated team.

 

Yes, eight teams.
You play quarterfinals in rotating bowl games, year to year, starting next weekend or Dec. 23 {Citrus, Gator, Cotton, etc.}
You play semifinals in two of the big bowls (again rotating, so as not to hurt any particular bowls' feelings) on Dec. 30
You play the final game Jan. 6 as one of the big bowls.
The mid-major and somewhat-major bowls get good exposure from year to year and three out of four largest bowls continue to participate in a huge way.
We can do this.
(Oh, and keep playing all the minor bowls as teasers throughout Dec. so the gamblers can still do all they want to do and so random teams are still able to cap their 7-4, 8-3, 9-2 seasons with a bowl game.)

 

If you don't play anyone, and your conference is a shit sandwich... tough.

 

I think we're in agreement there, I'm just saying -- and I think I speak for just about all of us here -- that we're gnashing teeth over the method of determinating who gets a chance to play for it. It'd be better, in my estimation, if the argument over the beginning of the process is over the last team to have a chance is the No. 8 team. as opposed to fighting over who the No. 2 is.

 

We think alike! That's my playoff pitch. And you select the top 8 teams, none of this "every conference gets a bid" junk. Why should a team like Wake Forest get a bid, when LSU or Wisconsin or Rutgers would whoop them? If the SEC or Big 10 or Big 12 deserves three or four bids one year, give it to 'em.

 

Only concern I have about multiple (meaning more than two) bids is that finishing third in your conference shouldn't be rewarded. I don't care how great your team was, if you can't win your conference (or at least division), you shouldn't play for a national title.

Yes, there are dog-ass conferences (see ACC this year), but I'd rather see Wake Forest at least have a shot than say Texas or Rutgers.

 

And how do you know this if they haven't played? I'm very much in favor of the basketball model, in this case the aforementioned 16-team playoff in which every conference winner is invited. Besides, they use a 16-team playoff at every other level of NCAA football, so let's be consistent. If Boise State really isn't as good as the Auburns and Wisconsins of the world, we'd find out pretty quick. And as we're seeing in basketball, the fact that mid-majors actually have a chance to play in a national-championship tournament would cause them to gradually get better, until eventually upsets would become an expected part of the tournament.

 

6 teams. #1 & #2 get a 1st round bye.
(3 v 6) v 2
(4 v 5) v 1

There aren't 8 teams worthy of being Nat'l Champ. And while it's great theater that an NC State or Villanove wins the tournement, there was little doubt about whther they were the best team in the country.
Limit it to 6 teams. 5 games. Use the Rose, Orange, Fiesta, Cotton & Sugar Bowls for the games.

edited for accuracy

 

Haven't any of you ever analyzed college sports?

College football does not primarily function as a sporting competition that endeavors with integrity, year in and year out, to find a "best team," or national champion. Oh, writers get caught up in it, and coaches occasionally, but athletic directors and university presidents? They know it to be a cashcow, a funding vehicle for all the other sports that the NCAA mandates a school house to be Division I, most of which serves as little trophy women for said athletic directors and university presidents as they compete for the Stanford Award, a.k.a the Sears Cup.

In other words, you're never going to see a 10-game season, because each home game is worth 2 mil in revenue. You're never going to see an end to the conference title game, because it, too, draws too much revenue. Television ratings for a college playoff, in my opinion, wouldn't be so much higher than bowl games that it would change the TV contract for them, which, under a playoff system, is the only way you could spread the money around to all other Division I programs who weren't in the playoff.

If you create a playoff, the bowls are dead, either literally or figuratively. They suddenly become the NIT. And if the bowls are dead, the perception that goes with getting to a bowl - a perception that leads rich men and women to donate millions of dollars in the name of progress - is dead, too. And that means a lot of programs are dead. Even if it's 16 or 24 teams - which it would never be, because it'd cut into home game revenue - you're either leaving any team from a smaller conference out that isn't undefeated - which gives them little purpose in playing - of teams from larger leagues like, say, the No. 2 team in the Big 12. Presidents and athletic directors would never stand for it. Too much money involved. Too many small-sport, Title-IX sanctioned mouths to feed.

Of course it didn't have to be that way. Just 25 years ago, prior to the most significant court ruling in sports history - the one that allowed college teams to be on TV as many times as it wished - facilities weren't an issue. Dorms weren't an issue. Stadium upgrades - not an issue. Skyboxes, banked tracks, giant video boards, rampant advertising - not an issue.

What changed? The athletic directors did. Out with the former football coach. In with the guy with a Master's in sports management, to whom accomplishment was fundraising, monument-building, and pissing contests. What the first thing most of these guys do?

Fire the current coach.
Throw money at some other coach.
Ask for money to throw at some upgrade.
Rinse your hands of anything that might go wrong. Repeat.

They look at boosters as stockholders - which they are most certainly not - that need to be caressed and babied. Enough of them get testy, and the coach is on the seat. How many of you have written that story? Do you know foolish and damaging and ennabling to fickle rich people such a story is?

It's one of the great failures of sports media, how they've allowed such repentant capitalists to take over college sports. Athletic directors are creating an economy that will price out most loyal fans with corporate boosters that will eat the pageant heart of stadiums on Saturday. We've got small sport teams taking monthlong summer trips all over the world, golf and tennis coaches making 70,000 to lead teams nobody watches, football coaches commanding seven figures. All in the name of "keeping up with the Joneses." College athletics is now, then, supposed to be both pure of heart and flush with cash out the ass.

The duality is a total paradox. How do you ask a boy who's just walked through a oak-paneled locker room with televisions and video games - flanked on both sides short-skirted hostesses who may or may not later lead him to a house of tail - that's he to come there in the fall, cut out all the distractions and play old-school, hard-nosed football? How stupid is that? While the media throws around scenarios for their fictional He-Man league, that's the real story behind college football and why it functions so idiotically.

Instead of these stories, I'd like to see the one that investigates why an athletic department pays 30 people to be on its marketing staff, complete with state payroll and benefits, when that worked could be outsourced to, say, a firm of ten people at a quarter of the cost. Or why an athletic department has 20 associate athletic directors, so as to squeeze them into a higher pay grade. Or why they feel the need to pay for 100-200 academic support staff, including tutors. Or why they need to have their own cafeterias, with dieticians, chefs, etc.

Mind you, I know the political answer behind those questions - college sports is a big business. Except that it's not for 20 other sports, which suck off the teat of one.
I'm not suggesting it's the media's job to give answers. It is their job to at least ask those questions, though. We ask those questions all the time of our government. Why is it that athletic departments are viewed as the same kind of wasteful entities?

So, in the spirit of Jim Mora, I ask: Playoffs?