NCAA Football Playoff’s Myth#1

I’ll start at the bottom and work my way up.

If the college basketball season is so great, please tell me the date of the first non-FSU related game you watched this year?

Many people don’t care at all about college basketball until at least mid January or February. A playoff hardly makes for a compelling regular season.

Playoffs always get the right team! Settle it on the field!

I propose that there be no “official” preseason poll and no weekly polls until the 9th or 10th game of the season. This would eliminate the favoritism that the top 10 pre and early season teams have. This would eliminate the bias that the teams currently ranked 20 and lower in the pre and early season experience, due to the slim chance of them being able to penetrate the top 5 even with a great season. Presently if you don’t start the season as one of the top ranked teams, your chances of getting there are slim, especially now that SOS has been taken out of the formula.

By not starting “official” polls until very late in the season, you let all the teams play the games and sort it out on the field before starting to rank which team is better than another. Regardless, the subjectivity and the regional and conferences biases will still be there since a percentage of the BCS poll still involves the human element.

Magazines, blogs, and newspapers can still publish there own polls, but what I am calling the “official” polls (the Harris and the Coaches), which make up 2/3 of the BCS poll, should not be taken nor released until late in the season, in my scenario.

Also, I am not a big fan of the coaches poll and would favor it being replaced with another poll where loyalties, biases, and ignorance of the coaches does not equal 1/3 of the total BCS poll. Maybe something like the RPI’s which heavily takes SOS into consideration.

But understand that FSU’s chances of winning a national championship plummet exponentially with its coming into being.

There will be more games impacting the national championship picture if conference winners or teams finishing in the Top 8 have a playoff spot waiting for them.

But for me the costs of this kind of shift just wouldn’t be worth it.

There would undoubtedly be some excitement in seeing teams battle it out for the 8th playoff spot, or a conference championship, but would it be as exciting as seeing the teams at the top have to stay perfect (or close to it)? I don’t think it would. Seeing the top 2 or 3 teams’ seasons riding on every game is more exciting for me than seeing the 8th, 9th, and 10th best teams seasons riding on whether they can avoid a third loss. I’ll always look to reward perfection over rewarding “pretty good.”

There would be another cost that I think FSU fans should be particularly sensitive too. I’m sure many of us remember those 90s battles with Miami and Florida as one of the high points of our college football fandom. Yet if we’d been under a playoff, those games would have lost some of their luster since both teams would have been playoff bound no matter what. You can’t tell me those losses would have been as painful, or those wins as sweet, if it would have just been for seeding purposes. Maybe we could reproduce those type of matchups in the playoffs, so they wouldn’t be lost entirely, but for me there is something uniquely appealing about how college football can have such a massive game played on campus, during the regular season.

I look forward to the other installments in the playoff debate. It is one of my favorite college football subjects and unfortunately I think both sides often rely on weak arguments.

we have already lost the EVERY GAME, EVERY SATURDAY IS IMPORTANT mantra in college football.

For instance who can forget these barn burners:

Ala 40 – FIU 14
Ala 53 – N TX 7
Ala 45 – Chat 0

or these sterling matchups:

TX 59- Louisiana-Monroe 20
TX 35 – UCF 3
TX 64 – UTEP 7

Adding SOS back to the BCS would be a step in the right direction. Perhaps put SOS on a sliding scale where it becomes a more important factor as we near the end of the season and we have a more accurate reading of what a teams true SOS is.

I would also be up for a playoff system of the top 6-8 teams vs. the CURRENT system. If you are truly elite, then you should be able to pull it off. If not then it wouldn’t really matter anyway would it?

At the end of the day we’re all Noles and can perform a group hug, but I’m the one whistling grenades past the heads of Pro-Playoff people. In fact, I’ve outsourced German engineers to improve “grenade-to-skull accuracy”.

If this Fanpost will become a multi-part myth buster series, I’ll save some ammunition for future installments. My basement reeks of gunpowder and fertilizer regarding these topics. First off, I agree that the BCS is a flawed process. This thought is almost universal outside of the folks receiving direct financial benefit from the system.

FrankD is right (first time in awhile) about the worthlessness and negative consequences of preseason polls. The “elasticity of ranking” is an easy term to refer to how an unranked team has an impossible climb while a sexy preseason pick (see: Georgia) can rest on their laurels deep into the season.
As Bud and others have mentioned before, the preseason has become less of a Power Ranking (which football squad is superior to all opponents everything being equal) to basically a Prediction Poll (who will go all the way this year?). I have no idea when this shift took place. Maybe it’s a symptom of society’s obsession with guessing games:
-Bracketology (pains me to type that stupid word)
-College and NFL Pick ’Em leagues
-to a lesser degree, fantasy sports

Americans like to know they guessed shi& better than their friends/family/co-workers/random people who threw 5 bucks into a pool. We feel smarter!
Somebody hook Rick Neuheisel up to a polygraph and ask if he’s ever dropped $50k on a Coaches poll vote.

I subscribe to Grassynole’s logic regarding the pageantry of college football saturdays. At what point did we decide everything that’s transpired over the past century of college football is a farce and requires an overhaul? Is my opinion complete subjective and lacking statistical support? Absolutely. But when the United States Congress sees fit to involve themselves in CFB’s multi-billion dollar industry, it’s time to activate the sirens and arm ourselves to the teeth.
That would be my slogan:
“Rejecting a College Football Playoff: Because Congress Wants One”

I’d like to see a survey of folks on polar sides of this debate. In my opinion, you’d find a strong positive correlation between people pushing for a playoff system and people still upset about the ending of “The Sopranos” and “No Country for Old Men”. If Congress had their way, David Chase would be forced to re-film and show America what really happened to Tony Soprano.
 
As a Florida State football fan, college football and Fall saturdays provide more than I could ever ask for. I don’t need or deserve to know who was the best team based on a tournament. Don’t dilute my favorite past time because you need closure while sitting on your sofa.

(I apologize for offending anyone, but these grenades weren’t even live)

i’m sure i’m going to get worked for this, but why isn’t fairness the primary issue here? in reality, CFB will always draw huge audiences. i.e. all Texas fans and few FSU fans are going to watch them crush UCF – same with us vs. Citadel (almost said jax st.) or whoever.

my main problem with this system is that people with questionable neutrality are making the decisions for a championship in an amateur sport. i’m aware of all the economic issues yada yada yada – it just seems like the fairest system should be more of a concern for those making the decisions (though not necessarily for the fans).

…b/c I like to watch playoff games. I’m not concerned with what method is “correct”, only the fact that playoff games are exciting to me and bowl games (with the exception of the title game and whatever toilet bowl FSU happened to stumble into the past few years) are boring to me. I’m all about enjoying my life more, so that means I would like to see a playoff in major college football.

The title should go to the best team at the end of the season. The seasons body of work should decide which teams make the playoffs. Every single sport in the world decides a champion this way.
It could be speculated that FSU would have won a few more titles had there been a playoff. Just go back to the wide right years. Many seasons the Noles were clearly the best team at the end of the year, thanks to playing a tough schedule through the season.
Arguing about it is silly. Why don’t we just let writers and coaches vote for MFL and MLB champs while we’re at it.
There will never be a REAL champ unless it’s played out on the field. The money involved in the bowl system will make sure that never happens.

The only thing more idiotic is the idea of writers and coaches deciding a champion.

The writers have a poll and so do the coaches. I mentioned both.
To my point, genius, the field of play doesn’t decide a national champ either. At least not like it does is ALL OTHER MAJOR SPORTS.
Here’s some advice, don’t drink and type. You’re too smart to be sliding out in this conversation.

Thanks for removing some of my posts MattDNole. I don’t blame you.

Many levels to this. A good example of unworthy was when NC State beat Houston for the hoops title. They still won and called themselves champs, but there were many better teams that year, Houston being one of them. NC State just got it done, with the right match ups, through the ACC and then the NCAA tourney. They were better that day and it was a great sports story.

I am not against a 4 team, or “plus one” system in football if it were designed correctly and included some sort of strength of schedule component.

regarding sample size we already have a playoff… only two teams are in it.

How’s that for too small a sample size.

The reason a playoff exists in most sports not called NCAA FBS (and some unknown soccer league), is because at the end of a sport’s season, there are usually a number of teams who are elite and deserving of a spot in a championship game. So, years ago all these really dumb people got together and decided that they would create a really dumb system in which the elite teams would vie for a championship. Soon, every major sport in the world adopted the strategy and implemented playoff systems because they realized that the idea of subjectively choosing two teams out of multiple elite teams to play in a championship was asinine.

Fast forward if you will, to the year 2012. The Alabama Crimson tide go undefeated, they dominate UF in the SEC Championship game (yay, the crowd goes wild) and secure a spot in the BCS National Championship Game.

At the same time, on the same planet, the Texas Longhorns go undefeated and crush Oklahoma in the Big 12 Championship game (yay, the crowd goes kind of wild) and secure a spot in the BCS National Championship Game.

In addition, The Florida State Seminoles (under the amazing direction of CJF) also go undefeated after slipping by UF and Va Tech in the ACC Championship Game (crowd chops) and secure a spot in the BCS ….. Wait…. nevermind. FSU doesn’t get to play in the championship game because NCAA FBS isn’t decided with a multi team playoff. Its decided by some jacka$$ in a control room. Genius

Simple. Combine the ap, coaches & harris polls. The teams that come out in the top 8 of those 3 polls combined go to the playoff. If you conference champ isn’t good enough to be in the top 8, too bad.