I’m worried about the future of college football (and why I’m glad Penn State got snubbed)
The media is lining up against the four-team College Football Playoff, and it was inevitable.
It’s beginning to look just like the groupthink against the BCS that ultimately led to the 4-team playoff. I can neither confirm nor deny if Dan Wetzel is working on his follow up book titled Death to the Selection Committee.
RELATED: How Playoff committee got it wrong — again
The sports media and college football thought-leaders won’t stop until we have an expanded playoff similar to the NFL. You know, the least messy version of selecting postseason participants.
I don’t deny that the system is messy. It’s very much that, and an eight-team playoff with guaranteed slots for conference champions with a few at-large bids would clean up everything.
And make college football much less interesting at the same time.
The college football media is so consumed with righting the wrongs of potential deserving teams being snubbed from the postseason that they’re willing to kill off everything that makes college football fun, interesting and gloriously controversial.
The BCS was already killed off, and the four-team playoff will undoubtedly face a similar fate sooner rather than later.
…
College football has always had a unique ingredient that made it different. That ingredient was subjectivity.
Teams in different conferences not only play different styles of football, but they play different schedules. Comparing teams in different parts of the country is difficult to do with any degree of objectivity.
The polls have long been the attempt for us to catalog and rank which teams are better, even though a large degree of subjectivity was consistently involved.
The polls are amazing. The polls are ridiculous. It’s college football.
The first attempt to give us a championship game between the two best teams in the country was, of course, the Bowl Championship Series (BCS). Computer formulas were involved in an attempt to reduce potential regional bias and keep some degree of objectivity. But then of course we had computers choosing our champions, which was unacceptable. The criticism was immediate and consistent throughout the lifespan of the BCS system.
The pushback against computer formulas, of course, led to embracing the idea of a selection committee. Humans actually watch the games! These people are much better than a computer!
…
When the Playoff arrived, it was met with unanimous glee. Finally we would decide the champions on the field!
Championships should be won on the field. Not in a boardroom. Congrats to Bama, Wash, Clemson, and Penn St on being the 4 most deserving.
— Danny Kanell (@dannykanell) December 4, 2016
Oops. Maybe not?
It’s fascinating to see the vast majority of the media root for the removal of subjectivity from the process when the messiness of college football provides near-unlimited fodder for columns, radio segments and more.
And here’s the thing I believe is often missed: The discussion is fun.
We’re not debating how many weeks Roger Goodell should suspend some guy for smacking his girlfriend. We’re not talking performance enhancing drugs policy. We’re debating which teams are better! Isn’t that one of the most core elements of being sports fans?
So, yes, very soon, we’ll likely move to an eight-team Playoff. We’ll have conference champions locked in, and then have three at-large teams.
Will there be some debate over the three at-large teams? Sure, but it won’t be anything close to what we just saw. I mean, really, how worked up are you going to get debating which three-loss team is better?
We’ll also begin to have some really average teams in the playoff as a result of winning their respective conferences. Who’s excited for a repeat of the 2012 five-loss Wisconsin team winning the Big Ten?
But at least we’ll have a clean system. Killing the potential for a good team getting snubbed is the only thing that matters nowadays.
We’d rather have mediocre teams involved if it means ensuring we have all good teams involved.
I believe one of the key misunderstandings in how college football is covered is how important the messiness and subjectivity is to the success of the game. It’s a huge part of what makes this game interesting. It’s the driving force behind 95 percent of our college football-related conversations with our friends.
If you didn’t notice, interest in sports is rarely about the actual play of the game on the field or on the court. Sure, the die-hards might talk about zone coverages or what offensive coordinator is drawing up the best schemes, but the masses talk about the game surrounding the game.
When the conversations around the game cease to be fun conversations (e.g. NFL), or worse yet, they cease to even exist on a national scale (e.g. MLB), look out. Interest will start to decline.
But that won’t be the main problem. It’ll just be a symptom of the problem. The real problem will be that we’ve made college football to be just like the NFL. We’ll have killed off everything that made college football glorious and unique.
So an expanded playoff is going to ruin college football? Would you have said the same about college basketball? Last i checked they have pretty good success with that.
College basketball is unwatchable other than three weeks in march.
This exactly.
The tournament marginalized the regular season. None of the games played before January even matter.
False. Its resume builders for seeding and getting in.
I don’t particularly enjoy the idea of expanding to 8, watching more teams get the Ohio State treatment (sit at home safely during conference championship week) and have a de facto advantage over conference champions. Alabama lost Shaun-Dion Hamilton for the year yesterday, in a game against an overmatched Florida team, while Ohio State didn’t have to risk such injury. Put in 8 teams, and half of them will be sitting around idle.
This!
College football teams do not have a farm team they can dial up a replacement for injured players. The fans and sports writers / media want an undisputed college football national champion. It ain’t going to happen all the time with an 8 or 16 or 32 team playoff, because the longer the season the more injuries to personnel capped rosters. What happens when you go to an 8 team playoff, and #8, a 9-3 or 10-3 team wins out because their 12 or 13-0 #1 opponent loses two or three key players in the last two games?
It’s my understanding that the NCAA does not recognize the CFP Champion. Therefore, I surmise that the CFP is NOT an NCAA-sanctioned event. If the playoffs are expanded, most coaches will in favor of reducing the number of regular season games. The schools play the number of games mandated by the NCAA. Something would have to give…
bamaump that is the problem the NCAA doesnt run the postseason! They should.
Who are the schools that didn’t have six wins that got in?
Kentucky needs to avoid them.
At this point I’d rather go back to the days when the media just selected the champions. I’m done with all these methods of a National Championship game.
Let’s make the traditional bowl games matter again. Let’s give power to the Conference Championships by ensuring that a team that doesn’t win their conference has no chance to end up as the national champions at the end of the season.
The 4 team playoff at least guarantees a legit champion. A two loss team just isn’t a champion. If we were in the bsc era still then two of either Washington, Ohio state, or Clemson would get screwed over. The number two spot is cloudy but at least the 3 questionable ones are in it. No one deserving is getting left out. Penn state last two games so they don’t deserve to be in.
Penn State lost two games at the beginning of the season (one of which was a rivalry game on the road against a fairly decent team). The only one of those loses that was particularly bad was the loss to Michigan, and they finished ranked inside the top 10.
PSU won 9 straight games, beat OSU, slaughtered MSU, and then beat the #6 team in the country to win the Big Ten.
OSU lost to Penn State, struggled against MSU and Wisconsin, and only beat Michigan due to an insane amount of terrible missed calls from the refs (of course, when those officiating the game are Ohio residents…). They didn’t win their conference or their division. If it wasn’t for the fact that Urban Meyer is their head coach they wouldn’t be in.
Penn State got robbed. They did everything they had to to get that last spot.
As far as the BCS system was concerned, yeah it wasn’t exactly the fairest system. But I’m almost positive that they would have dropped far outside the top 5 when they lost to PSU and not have found themselves remotely close to playing for a national title. The committee is a joke.
Your thesis seems to be something like “with 8 teams, there won’t be as much for sports writers to write about and that’s a bad thing for me, a sports writer.”
I mean, OSU won it all 2 years ago with an awful lot of chatter around TCU deserving the #4 spot. Fans feeling like a team deserving a championship was left out completely, that can’t be good for the sport.
You’re afraid the chatter will die out and the games will become meaningless? Really? So, who would get your 3 at-large in an 8 team playoff this year? Obviously OSU gets one of them. Does the B1G get 4 teams, with Mich and Wisc making it in? Are they limited to 2 or 3 teams? If so, who gets in and who’s left out? Right now, they have 4 of the top 8. I believe fans of USC, Colorado, and FSU will have strong opinions about that. You don’t? Does an undefeated W. Mich deserve an 8 seed?
And let’s put to rest the notion of automatic bids being such a bad thing when OSU essentially got a bye week as a result of a loss. The current system rewarded them for losing. That’s not a good system.
College football is the most exciting athletic competition ever to be conceived. If you want to be a sports writer, and you can’t make your story exciting by writing about the actual game. You wasted your college tuition and your teachers are being paid by how many A-grades they give away.
Your idea couldn’t be more backwards. All the speculation about ranking is garbage and reads just like supermarket tabloids. Letting the season play out before you speculate about where teams should be ranked is just minimum brain function for everyone except cheerleaders.
Sportswriters have never decided conference champions. Now that we have conferences with more members AND we have a conference championship game (a first round play-off ), readers hate media cheerleaders more than ever. There is no need to give Ohio State or anyone else a second chance. They couldn’t win their conference. Good luck next year. No conference champion should be left out of the play-off for the Division 1 title 85 scholarships, or the Division 1-AA, or the Div. 2, or 3. LET ME MAKE THIS CLEAR, WE HAVE ALWAYS HAD A BETTER WAY OF IDENTIFYING A REAL NATIONAL CHAMPION, WE JUST HAVEN’T USED IT YET. That is why tabloid writers still try to snake oil us, are you starting to see how close you are to not having a job anymore?
The above article perfectly explains why I am completely bored by CFB. Nothing is less interesting then hearing talking heads opining about who their final four is. What would be really good is a true champion decided on the field absent opinion. In the NFL and at every other level a true champion is decided on the field absent subjectivity. I guess all those systems are wrong.
Also I would respectfully disagree college basketball season is unwatchable. I attended the UAB vs Auburn game Saturday. It was a great game and better then the SEC Championship game for sure.
The CFP is fine. I think it’s perfect. The regular season still matters and we get 4 teams in a playoff. Sorry penn state but if you didn’t lose to pitt or Michigan you’d be in. No one got snuffed. They’re lucky any pays attention. Don’t lose and you’ll have a chance at the playoffs. With 60 teams in you’ll still get people complaining about not making it.