In his recent column, “BCS system, not playoffs, is best for college football,” Dallas Morning News columnist Tim Cowlishaw is the latest to side with the BCS-apologist crowd.
Let’s take his points one by one…
The overriding point playoff supporters miss is that a playoff changes everything. There’s nothing neat and tidy about an eight-team playoff.
Damn right it changes everything, and that’s a very, very good thing. No one said that an eight-team playoff would be neat and tidy. It just needs to be neater and tidier than the current system, and that’s not hard to do.
If you take the six big conference winners and use some sort of formula or committee similar to the NCAA basketball tournaments to select the two at-large spots, how does that work? Does the team perceived to be the best of the nonBCS schools automatically get a selection?
If so, that leaves only one at-large berth to a runner-up.
Cowlishaw invokes the NCAA basketball tournament, then flies off on a BCS school tangent. I don’t know that each BCS conference has to be represented, but if such a rule were to exist, what’s wrong with only one or two runner-ups getting bids? Second place finishers in BCS conferences had their chance to make the playoffs and they couldn’t even win their own conference. Having one or two at-large bids for runners-up is actually a good thing, because it will “keep hope alive” for those teams that lose early or fall behind in the conference race. You take the one or two best runners-up, and you’ve got your field of eight.
One common argument from BCS-apologists is that there is no perfect way to create that eight-team field. There will always be arguments why the #9, #10 or #11 teams should have made it. March Madness is set up in the same way, and while there is always some debate on Selection Sunday, it dies down quickly because everyone knows that those teams that didn’t make the field don’t have a legitimate argument that they are the best team in the nation. Yeah, maybe they should have made it over Team X or Team Y, but did they really have a shot to win the title? Of course not. The same goes for football, where the chances are slim that the ninth-, tenth- or eleventh-best team in the nation really has a legit shot to win three games against the best teams in the land.
To avoid these kinds of questions, you have to go to a 16-team tournament and at that point, the regular season has lost its unique quality. If that many teams are postseason bound, then you completely alter the emotions that spilled out of Texas and Texas Tech fans in the final dramatic plays late Saturday night.
I still can’t get my head around this whole “the regular season will become less important/dramatic” argument. If there are more spots available for the postseason that means there will be more teams in a position to vie for those spots which means that the intensity and drama (on the whole) will increase, not decrease. Even if we assume that the drama surrounding the Texas/Texas Tech rivalry would be diminished with an 8- or 16-team playoff – and that’s a big assumption – what about the increase in drama surrounding the other 10 or 15 teams that have a shot to make the playoffs? What’s the net effect on the sport? Sure, you can throw out one example of a game that will have less importance, but what about the seven or eight other games that become more important because there’s a more inclusive playoff system in place?
College football is different from every other sport in that it doesn’t always provide a bow on a neatly tied package at the end of the year.
I will gladly sacrifice that in order to maintain the integrity of autumn Saturday afternoons and nights. Those are nothing less than the best days in sport.
He’s assuming that a playoff would ruin “the integrity” of the regular season. Look at the NFL, is the regular season a bore? No, every week is important yet the playoffs are inclusive enough that heading down the home stretch, there are a number of teams that are still in the hunt. This increases the interest and the drama.
And then there’s the “neatly tied package” comment. There’s a reason that every other major sport ends in a playoff…
IT’S THE BEST WAY TO DECIDE A CHAMPION!
College football fans that didn’t want to see a Big Ten team play for a nation championship can celebrate tonight as unranked Iowa upset No. 3 Penn State 24-23 with a last second field goal.
