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

Not meaning to threadjack, has anyone else ever thumbed through a football program during a slow time before the game or whenever and laughed out loud at the number of people with four-line titles in the average large athletic department gravy train?

I've done a couple of times. Same athletic departments that b_tch about revenue, and how many of these idiots are making more than 90 percent of us on this board for doing what?

 

Unrepentant?

 

Alls I'm going to say is that if that if Notre Dame went undefeated with Boise State's schedule, I doubt many of the people arguing so strenuously for BSU would do the same for the Irish.

 

When Miami won its first title, it did so with a loss, a schedule commensurate with Boise's and Osborne exchewing the tie and the Nebraska title.

 

All well and good, but I'm comparing how 2006 Boise State backers would react if 2006 Notre Dame went undefeated with 2006 Boise State's schedule. Would people demand they get in the national championship game if they weren't in the BCS top two?

 

Is anyone actually demanding that Boise State gets into the national championship game?

 

How is this different than the situation now? Are the Armed Services Bowl and Poinsettia Bowl and their ilk not the NIT already? Why should a playoff kill the rest of the bowls and the wonderful good feeling that goes with them any more than the BCS does? Don't non-BCS conference schools already have to go undefeated to get a shot at the big time (of course, if you do a playoff with automatic bids, that's not the case)?

Actually, Alma, I agree with you on your real points, that college football is resistant to change because it has become such a huge, lucrative industry, and that big-school athletic programs are horrendously bloated. But the assertion that a playoff would kill off smaller football programs by killing the minor bowls is, in my humble opinion, flawed. ESPN needs the programming too much to let them die.

 

If you have an eight-team playoff and the eighth seed gets hot and runs the table, is it the true champion, even if it has two or three losses?
For that matter, if the final ends up being eight vs. two or even eight vs. seven, does that taint the title in some way?
If the final isn't always one vs. two or at the very least one vs. three, does it diminish what the national championship means?
One defender of the current system pointed out that the best college basketball team in the country didn't even make it to the Final Four, that four teams that didn't make it (Duke, UConn, North Carolina and Villanova) were better than any of the teams that did. If South Carolina, the NIT champion, can beat Florida, the NCAA champion, twice during the regular season, how can Florida be the true champion?

 

Because they are. Like this is anything new. From Villanova-Georgetown to Kansas-Oklahoma, there have always been upsets in the NCAA Tournament. And basketball, mind you, is a little different with the extended schedule and home-and-homes. But that's how their system works.

If something similar happened in a football playoff, so be it, that's how the system works.

And it's not like this system is flawless. During the regular season, the 2000 Canes beat Florida State, another one-loss team that got the nod to play the title game. 2001 Oregon missed out to a Nebraska team that lost 62-36 in its regular season finale and failed to win the Big 12 North. 2003 USC was the top-ranked team in both polls at the end of the regular season but didn't do enough in the BCS' eyes. And 2004 Auburn (and for that matter, Utah) went unbeaten during the regular season and were on the outside looking in, at two other teams with no blemishes.

Would a playoff be perfect? No system ever is. But it might be better than what we have now.

 

Because Florida won it on the freakin' court (unlike the football champ).

 

No taint.

It is ridiculous that the best conferences in football are routinely penalized for having monster schedules and their top teams taking a loss or two.

Eight teams would get all one-loss teams, and the best two-loss teams. So obviously a great idea, it makes the head hurt that it isn't in play.

 

Because when the stakes were clear, Florida came through. The others, who also knew what was at stake at the time, did not when it counted.