I always thought Kirk Herbstreit was all right, but he’s starting to get full of himself. When Dick Vitale was on the phone talking about the lack of a playoff system in college football, Herbstreit asked him, (and I’m paraphrasing) “Sure the system is flawed, but in college basketball you have 64 teams and three weeks and that’s great, but what about December and January when the games don’t matter?” First of all, I take issue with saying that regular season college basketball games “don’t matter.” Conference titles seem to mean more in college hoops than they do in college football, and since teams usually play each other twice, each team gets a chance to play everyone at home and away, which makes things more fair when determining a conference champion.
Herbstreit’s argument is that every game means something in college football whereas in college basketball, they don’t mean enough. The problem with that argument is that America has always been a second (or third) chance society. If you have a bad day and mess up, you get another chance to redeem yourself. In college football, there is very little room for error. If you lose a game, you’re basically out of it. Sure, you’ve got a shot to scrap and claw your way back into it, but the chances are slim that you’ll be playing for a national championship in January. That’s especially true for the loser of the OSU/UM game next Saturday. Right now, these two teams are considered the two best teams in the nation – is the loser suddenly not in the top 2? The loser is out of it because they simply lost too late in the season. That just doesn’t make any sense.
Vitale wasn’t saying that college football should institute a 64-team playoff. That works for hoops but it would never work for football; there just isn’t enough time for all of those games.
I keep going back to the idea of a 4- or 6-team playoff. If you want to make games important, imagine the final two weeks of the college football season, when eight or 10 or even 12 teams still have a shot to make the top 6. Suddenly, those conference championship games and late-season rivalry games become crucial, when right now a one-loss Big 12 or Pac-10 or even Big 10 team is probably on the outside looking in, just playing for a shot in a different BCS bowl or a secondary bowl.
Why can’t this work? What’s the downside?
Give the fans what they want. Fight the good fight, Kirk.
