Pretty much nailed that one. To answer blazzinken, I think a lot of money is earned by BCS bowls from all the promotion crap that surrounds each bowl. They have a month before the end of the season and the start of these games, and the teams arrive early and they can try to have fanfare and media attention. Some of this is theoretically lost as some bowls simply would not know who is coming until the previous week or so, and then they wouldn’t have much time to promote the game as they would like. Selfish and stupid, as you are right: I think a playoff would generate more money anyway, but whatever.

Great post, but one more thought about the regular season argument: Isn’t it already ruined? Well, not ruined, but at least not what it could be? I believe it was week 3 this season when Reece Davis declared (to paraphrase): “the games this week just suck.” (Think about for a moment what it takes for him to say that — one of his primary jobs is to promote the games that his network is carrying). The point is, the current system incentivizes traditional powers to schedule “buy” games so as not to tarnish their record going into conference play in hopes of making one of those two coveted spots in the BCS game and generally encourages 2-3 weeks per season of noncompetitive matchups.

A playoff system could have several benefits. First, shaving a week off the regular season to make room for a playoff system partially addresses the “strain on the student-athlete” argument" and probably eliminates a week of useless games. Second, a playoff system would do more to incentivize challenging schedules, as every team would want to make the strongest possible case that it should be included in the field and seeded well.

Finally, one of the things that bothers me most about the system created by the BCS and those who apologize for it is their embarassing lack of strategic vision. If it’s dollars they’re after (and I’m sure it is), I firmly believe that a playoff system would generate substantially more revenue and (as you noted) could be done in a way that includes the big bowls and still allows the Meineke Car Care Bowl and its ilk to provide an NIT-type outlet for teams left out of the playoffs.

…thought through post, even by your standards, PB. As a playoff skecptic I would only make the following points.

A. You are absolutely wright in identifying the principal but not at atll inconsquential objection to a prospective playoff: the possibility, if not, indeed, the near certainty that it would be made into a disgracefull disaster. Add the possibility if not the probability of expansion to 16 teams and meaningful degradation of the sport is inevitable.

B. Absolutely love BZs system (for which he himself makes the most comprehensive and compelling case and which need not be rehearsed here), would consider it a huge improvement on what we have now, and have been pushing it on everyone everywhere I can for nearly 2 years.

C. Involving the Bowls in a prospective system. Yes, and this years bowls have told us something about the dangers of an overinclusive pre-formated system. Penn State and Tech would have been included in a playoff and yet the bowls clearly show that they did not deserve a shot, although we probably already knew that about Tech (to be fair, they might well have played differently with advancement at stake). Wonderful for Utah, a great accomplishment, a top 5 team, but do I really believe that a team that beat TCU (thrashed by OU in Fort Worth) by 3 points in overtime and an unmotivated (in the 1s quarter), Andre Smithless Bama deserve a shot at the Florida/OU winner when Florida beat a supermotivated Bama with Smith, when they themselves were without Harvin? I think not.

D. USC has a beef but its not like they played a murderers row in in the Pac 10 (the great bowl showing notwithstanding) and they did loose to Oregon State (crushed by PSU, lost to Stanford, crushed by Oregon, scored 3 points against Pitt).

E. The one team that really has a gripe, you’ll be surprised to learn is the Horns, which fell victim to a ludicrous Big 12 rule and … um.. subpar judging in the beauty contests with OU. First, because we’re damned good looking. Second, because it would have been very difficult for reasonable voters to look closely at the resumes, the season, and the head-to-head and give the edge to OU. As an objective matter I can’t acutally say we’re better than them, though I like our chances in a a rematch for reason you’ve delineated elsewhere. I absolutely think, however, that we did enough to have been placed in the BIG12CG. (FWIW, I don’t at all like our chances against Florida which will beat the LTs like by at least 10 points).

Bottom line, fantastic and very persuasive post, but remain skeptical of a playoff.

over at Slate, also arguing for a playoff.

… but I just wanted to say, how lucky are we as Texas fans / fans of this blog to have a freaking law student making such well-written arguments like this?

Props to Mr. Bean.

I grew up watching both BCS (1-A) and FCS (1-AA) football. My father is from Texas and my mother is from Montana. As a fan of good football I follow both teams. This has let me see the Playoff System work.

Montana plays in the FCS and is one of the top teams in that division. I watch as they play each game and if one doesn’t go their way they start to wonder if they wont make the playoffs. They play each week for the opportunity to stay ranked as a top team and and a chance to play for the National Title. By the time the Playoffs come at the end of November and through December anyone can win it is so intense and the stadiums are sold out and TV viewing is at a high. By the time the title game has come lines have been drawn and once its over you have a National Champion. This years NC features Montana and the Richmond Spiders. The Spiders won. There was no controversy over who was the National Champion.

If there was a playoff system in the BCS I can guarantee that it would be even bigger. Unless you are a fan of the FCS school you don’t pay attention to them, but with the BCS everyone throughout the country knows who they are. Hears the controversy and thinks that the system has a problem.

A playoff system would do wonders for the BCS.

Let it be played out on the field, not in a computer. Using the argument that you should do it because everyone else does, usually doesn’t work, but in the case they use a playoff system to determine who is the best in most sports and it works. Moneys not the issue. In the FCS there are no sponsors for the playoffs (its not allowed) and they still bring in an excess. For Montana the playoffs every year help the budget.

Someday hopefully the BCS will figure it out.

Thanks for a great argument PB!

Peter,

Excellent, cogent and persuasive argument that in one form or another has been made by you and others for years. It seems like a no-brainer, yet I see no movement toward a play-off by the powers that decide such matters. Exactly what or who do you thnk is keeping this from coming about and why?

but they have the “Cinderallas” which sicken me. You get a 9-4, 10-3 underachiever who “gets hot” and is suddenly the National Champion and their coach is a genius. Other than that, I agree.

When I see a team like the Chargers (8-8, fun to watch, not for the Colts I guess) win in the playoffs and say things like “we’re all 0-0 right now, its a new season”, I feel like it’s an absolute slap in the face.

I suppose the counter argument is if you are truly championship material you can beat anyone, anytime, anywhere, under any pressure situation.

College football fans, the vast majority of whom indisputably want a playoff, have the power in their own hands to fix this continuing abortion of a system. A nationwide boycott of but a single week of college football early in the Fall would bring the current cartel to its knees. Are we ready to take back our game?

We need to take the arguments of those who defend the current BCS system to their logical conclusions. We are told about the importance of academics and not interferring with exams. We are told the current system makes every regular season game important and creates fan interest even in games outside their conference. We then to say, “OK, fine,” and ask the defenders of the staus quo why shouldn’t these noble concernsalso apply to basketball and baseball? Shouldn’t we have a “BCS” in these sports? Why not have just the top 2 teams in baseball (determined by polls and computer rankings) play a best 4 out of 7 College World Series. None of this regionals, super-regionals, and 8-team CWS.

Peter, I regret that I cannot share in the one-sided favoritism flowing from your choir, as I found all arguments in this to be frighteningly near-sighted, and frankly, I find that most of them just miss the point.

[not-so-important dispute with your particulars]:

The regular season will be meaningless in an 8-team playoff, particularly for as long as we employ pre-season polls (which is one of the primary differences between the hypothetical NCAA format and the pre-existing NFL format).

It is first necessary to establish that most college football fans possess a two-dimensional interest in the sport: they [first] follow their own school, and they [second] follow the title contenders at the top (Texas is lucky enough that the two overlap). So the typical Saturday of the college football fan is marked by a home-team viewing party, followed by one or two “Games of Century of the Week.” This has evolved as a way of eleviating the dulls of a poor campaign for your school (you supplement the excitement by living vicariously through other, more successful teams), as well as a way to share in a collective experience of college football.

In any given year, the number of teams with legitimate title aspirations wavers somewhere between 4 and 8. While the preseason polls may not accurately declare a #1 team, I’m willing to say they group the top 8 with consistent accuracy (this is largely because there are generally about 5 teams that have loaded rosters returning, and one of those 5 pretty much always wins the NC). So each season the preseason polls will anoint an “elite 8,” and I’m willing to bet that in most years, those 8 are the same teams standing the end, or at least 6 or 7 of them, This essentially means that as long as the pre-season top 8 teams finish with fewer than 3 losses, they make the cut of the tournament. Goodbye “Games of the Century of the Week,” and goodbye tough, non-conference scheduling. There is no longer any incentive to impress anyone (your returning roster does that for you in August); all that remains is the incentive not to accrue too many losses.

Take this season, for example, The title contenders this year were, by all accounts, USC, Florida, Oklahoma, Georgia, Penn St., and Texas. And whom were we left with in December? Those very teams (although you have to swap Texas Tech for Georgia, which doesn’t much dent my primary contention). The RRS? Meaningless, as the playoff format still requires that we must go through each other again later. Penn St./Ohio St.? Meaningless, as a loss doesn’t cost either team dearly. And so on, and so on.

It could be said, and has been stated here often, that non-contenders have the same season either way (an understandable point), however I argue that by shifting the emphasis to the post-season and taking the luster off the regular season, the non-contenders will be even more left-out, because, as is, even as a mediocre squad, they get to play on the overhyped, crazy Saturdays in Autumn, whereas with a tournament, by the time the hype arrives, they’re done playing. In the same way the BCS bowls have dulled other bowl games that used to be fun by means of a shift in emphasis (after all, the same argument could have been made that converting the Orange Bowl into the National Title game shouldn’t affect the non-contender Sun Bowl, but in my eyes, it has), a playoff will similarly dull the regular season for non-contenders with an equivalent emphasis shift. The more we decide that achieving a “Champion” is all that matters to us, the less fun the sport as a whole becomes, because we care less and less about non-contenders, and those games lose their intensity, even among the players. I think every step so far in the evolution of college football has suggested this.

[much-more-important ideological disputes]:

I’ve said this stuff before, but as I keep hearing the same arguments form playoff proponents, I am content hitting them back with my regular ammo. First, I have always believed that a tournament reshapes the landscape and demographic of college football. First, you will be swapping out Autumn madness for Winter madness, which means most important and memorable games go from being played in the crisp, Autumn air on enthusiastic, populated campuses to being played on empty campuses during Winter break. Blecht!!!

Worse, you invite a new demographic to dominate the marketing interests of the sport, and I am certain that nobody on this message board actually wants that. As is, college football is mostly guided by a tug-of-war between devoted fans, alumni, and the interests of the athletic departments. The moment we conceive a tournament that appeals to the masses (casual March Madness or Super Bowl fans), you will see a lowering of the common denominator and the influx of the very marketing that has made the NFL unwatchable to me. The reason the Super Bowl is such an overhyped, soap-operatic suckfest every year, and the reason the Dallas Cowboys commission boy-bands to play ridiculous half-time shows on Thanksgiving Day, is precisely because the sport has found that it is more profitable to market to mainstream, low-brow interests than it is to present the sport as it is seen through the eyes of its most loyal fans. What percentage of people watching the Super Bowl actually give a damn about football? Now consider what impact that has had on the presentation of the sport, and further, why it is you currently find yourself reading a COLLEGE football blog. This will happen. It is blatantly naive to think otherwise.

Most importantly, and you will forgive me if I speak plainly: the concept of a “Champion” is stupid. This is something that has entered 20th Century zeitgeist, and just won’t go away. GO AWAY!! College football was amazing when teams just played 10 or 11 games, each faced all of its regional rivals, and at the end of each day you either reveled that your alma mater was better than his alma mater, or you sucked up a loss and waited for next week. Sure, if you wanted, you could keep track of the all-time series with your rival, and if you had a particularly good year, you could celebrate (this is what bowl games used to be), and maybe, just maybe, as icing on the cake, the media might abstractly declare that your school had the best season of all.

This is how the National Title began, it was as ridiculous and abstract then as the USA Today high school National Championship is now.

But if something hangs around long enough, and people grow accustomed to it, it sinks in, and pretty soon you have an entire public just ravenous to change the entire culture of a sport, overturn 100 years of spectacle, just so they, too, can have a “Champion,” just like all the other lousy sports.

But it remains asinine. A “Champion” is not only a recent and trendy proposition, it is an illogical and hypocritical one. It chooses, somewhat arbitrarily, to value one win over another. The Patriots beat the Giants on the road in December last year, but then lose in the final minute of a game played at a neutral site. We then choose to declare the Patriot’s victory meaningless, and the Giants as Champions. Asinine. If you want this to hit closer to home, suppose we beat OU by double digits on the neutral turf of the Cotton Bowl, but then we face them again in the playoffs, this time on the road in Norman. They win the game in double overtime and advance. Both teams are 1-1 against each other. But we have chosen to value their home-field, 2OT victory more than our neutral field double-digit win. Asinine. Absolutely, staggeringly idiotic. But trend (and constantly repeated, mindless, majority opinion) has gotten to the fans of even college football.

[final thoughts]:

The truth of this issue is that we would all enjoy the game a lot more if we stopped caring so much about who wins this abstract “Championship.” Oddly, we actually control the meaning of these games, because, we as a society, choose (at least indirectly) which games to infuse with emotion or drama. This is not to say, however, that I am so naive as to think we can undo the last 30 years of evolution that have achieved little more than an ambition toward what I consider to be a fool’s task (I prefer the old system to the BCS). Indeed, theorists often cite the “Ratchet Effect,” to argue that we can move forward, but never backward. However, we can at least get a grip on reality, and choose a better forward direction.

Before you cry about how Virginia Tech didn’t belong in your ultra-exclusive BCS club, maybe you should actually try to win your conference. The Fiesta Bowl was the meaningless game, played between two crybaby runners-up whose greatest strength was making money – not winning football games.

First let me preface this by saying that I am in support of a college football playoff system, but for the sake of argument would like to present a point not brought up in PB’s article that I find interesting in considering a playoff system. This is that a playoff system would fundamentally change the way that college football is played. Implementing a playoff would create a very conservative league, much like the NFL. In this “new” league teams such as Texas, Oklahoma, USC, Florida, Ohio State, etc. would flourish. These teams have the talent and resources to survive a playoff system. The old saying in the NFL is that by the playoffs “everyone is hurt.” So in creating a playoff system in college football you aren’t creating a competition as much as you are creating a survival contest. For example, earlier in the year Texas was “lucky” enough to play a four game stretch against four top 12 teams in a row. In the end we squandered our chance at a National Championship in the very last game of this four game stretch. Much of what went wrong in Lubbock was attributed to our poor play and the combination of fatigue and injury that plagued the team. This stretch is very similar to what teams would face in a playoff format. Football is a brutal sport and ultimately the team with the most depth would succeed in a playoff. This means that your top tier programs are the only ones that would compete for a national championship year in and year out. Unlike the NFL, the distribution of talent is not as equal. While we would like to think that it would be possible for a team like Texas Tech or Utah to get "hot" and run the table, the fact is they would just not have the overall personnel to succeed in such a demanding stretch of games. In fact, Utah is probably better suited to the current system. They can always claim a piece or argument to the 2008 National Championship. In a playoff system a team like Utah would be crushed. They might win their first round game against Alabama. If given a month to prepare for a single game, Utah might be able to knock off any top 5 team in the nation you pair them up with. However, in a playoff Utah would not beat three (round of eight requires three successive victories to be crowned champion) top eight teams in a row. The idea that a playoff would open up the National Championship is only true if you are one of a select few schools in the nation. Fortunately this scenario benefits a school like mine, Texas.

 For the reasons mentioned above,, I would eliminate the conference championships, or make everyone play one! i.e Pac10 Big 10. add 2 teams.

the sudden depth of analysis between you, brooklynhorn and skinpatrol, not to mention the lengthy soliloquies, have left me and my short attention span a little dizzy. If I see a post longer than 6-7 lines my eyes gloss over and I hit the “z” button. I’ve just been sitting at a desk looking at a screen for most of the day already for work. Sorry.

Otherwise, nice work. Right now I’m off to the FanShot section for a little recovery.