Cinderella Horns Win 2010 NCAA Championship!

Boise would go to the Humanitarian Bowl, and Va Tech would be in the Fiesta facing the Big 12 champ.

Why you ask?

Because the Sugar Bowl will take the Big 10 runner up to face Bama.

TCU would go to the Rose and face the Big 10 champ.

The Orange Bowl would take the ACC champ and the Big 12 loser from the title game.

So, VaTech gets its share of the big money, after losing to Boise on a neutral field, and will be lucky to be ranked in the top 15 at the time.

BIg 12 winner vs. Big East champ, otherwise known as the non top 25 rep.

you’d take 9-2 Georgia and tell 11-0 Boise state “nice season . . . but sorry, we we THINK you are not good enough.” If you moved it to 16, you’d take 8-3 Miami while leaving out 9-2 Wisconsin and five other three loss teams.

Plenty of people Boise or Madison would have been appalled by this too.

I can counter with a NE Patriots 08.

Consider that the rest of the world loves tournaments, but a tournament is not the same thing as a play-off. Tennis and golf are built around tournaments, and soccer has some enthralling tournaments. Those events generate excitement, but do not reward empty teams that win them by entrenching that year’s entire cultural significance within them, nor do they diminish an excellent team’s greatness by stripping them of glory simply because they slipped up on the wrong day.

But a playoff is not a tournament; it is something different. It’s in the very language; it connotes this idea that we haven’t established a team onto whom we want our glory to be bestowed, so we need to “play it out.” And the winner of this tournament is now going to be retro-fitted as the best team that season.

Which is where the Patriots come in. We should all absolutely be celebrating the fact that, after many decades of coming close, a team finally accomplished a 16-0 record. But who remembers this feat? No one. People barely remember it now, but a generation from now it will be lost almost entirely. Instead, a very mediocre Giants team gets the record book, and awkwardly, they are upon whom we have heaped all of 2008’s glory.

There are no Bush-push games in pro-football. No Missouri 5th downs. No Les Miles overtime thrillers. There are very few, if any at all, regular season NFL games we hoist as being crucial in making a team into the gloryful champion we’ve crowned. Personally I can’t remember any meaningful October games in my entire NFL-watching life. Sure we watch them, and the league profits from them, but they don’t shape the memories and the cultural relevance of that season. College football spreads the meaning from late-summer to early winter, and we all have great memories of everything in between.

And as LongCat says, we have a 120 team league, and one in which the participants cannot all play each other, which categorically precludes any “fair” method of determining a champion. So if we know we can’t accomplish that ideal, then let’s focus on the ideals we can affect, such as elongating the relevance of the game throughout a 5-month span, and not confining it almost entirely to a one-month Winter madfest. I value the game itself over who becomes crowned champion.

My suspician is that this is the way the world outside of the US sees it as well (largely). A tournament is exciting, and so we’re going to schedule them, by all means. But there is too much risk in placing the weight of history and glory upon only your tournament winner, when rationally we tend to sense that the team that dominated the entire year, on aggregate, is the team really worth remembering from that campaign.

Even better than the World Cup is the Champion’s League tournament. But when comparing tournaments and “champions” in soccer you have to compare apples to apples. The FA cup is the all-England tournament, while those teams still compete in a “League” which is a round-robin. Unequivocally, in all cases, the winner of the League is considered the best in England, while the FA cup is considered mostly just fun and exciting, and it needs to be noted that the two events have nothing to do with one another (unlike our playoffs and regular season).

 I would maintain that if we had both an International round-robin league, and a World Cup, that the winners would be treated the same as in England respectively. The Cup might be enthralling, but the winner of the League would be whom we recognize as the greatest soccer nation on Earth,

As per the BCS, I am against it, if only slightly. I preferred the old system of voting, in which there were no pretensions of objectivity. We treated it more like the Oscars. As a rebellion against that subjectivity, we could simply choose to value the season more than the champion. But the BCS is inching toward a facade of objectivity, which a playoff would complete. I think that when you have a facade of objectivity in determining a champion, in a league that has 120 teams all of whom don’t play each other, you’re shoe-horning an ideal, and the whole enterprise becomes specious and disingenuous.

My ideal scenario would involve stripping Divsion 1 down to 64 teams, at most. Then we can probably find more common ground on both sides of this debate.