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Jan2
Seriously, college football, get a playoff
Filed under: Apropos of nothing;
T-shirts trumpet the University of Kentucky's appearance in the Liberty Bowl in Memphis, today. But without a playoff system, college football's post season is all irrelevant hype. Herald-Leader photo by Mark Cornelison.
Excuse me while I take a post to rant about one of my pet peeves in sports:
Saturday night, after driving home all day from a Christmas vacation in Georgia, I grabbed a cold beverage, flipped on the TV, and landed on a bowl game.
To get a handle on what I was watching, I hit the info button on the TiVo remote and was informed I was watching the Emerald Bowl, a college football “playoff.”
“Playoff!” I wanted to sputter incredulously, like that infamous Jim Mora press conference, “Are you kidding me?”
Playoff would have meant the winner of that game, California, would advance to a next round with a possibility of eventually winning a championship. But alas, this was simply an exhibition game, and Cal finishes its season saying it won . . . the Emerald Bowl, which is played in San Francisco, not Oz.
Maybe if that TiVo info box inserted the words, “sorely needs a,” between the words college football and playoff, you may have an accurate statement. But at this time, there are no playoffs in college football, which makes it very hard to take the sport seriously.
We are in the midst of a “Bowl Championship Series” that will be hyped beyond belief by Fox for the next week leading up to a college football fictional championship game Jan. 8 between two teams I don’t give a rip about.
I bring this up here because this is an entertainment blog and the BCS is the biggest thing we are sold as entertainment for the next week. In sports circles, the BCS has been debated over and over and over and over again, with series apologists arguing it makes the regular season matter more and that the tradition of the bowls has to be preserved.
Cynical Rich loves this website my sister introduced me to, Despair.com. It sells “demotivational” posters, like the one for “Adversity” with a tree blown in hurricane winds and the slogan, “That which does not kill us only postpones the inevitable.” Like I said, my cynical side. Anyway, my favorite Despair poster is “Tradition” with a picture of the running of the bulls in Pamplona, Spain, and the slogan, “Just because you’ve always done it that way doesn’t mean it’s not incredibly stupid.”
And while some sports nuts and people with vested interests in keeping things the way they are may find some way to legitimize a system that lets a computer and some polls pick the two teams to play a national championship, most people realize that the current college post-season is incredibly stupid.
A playoff would diminish the regular season? Yeah, I guess like the NFL playoffs kill the pros’ regular season. No one really cares about those Sundays between September and December, do they?
Tradition? Please. The bowls have changed radically in my 41-year lifetime, being moved all over the calendar to accommodate the series and plastered with corporate names that extinguish any hint of character.
Picking the championship game teams ensures one of the best teams will win? Bo-ring. You know, usually the best team wins anyway. Look at the NCAA basketball tournament. I remember when my best friend Lee got teed off that North Carolina State came from nowhere to win the NCAA Championship in 1983, complaining that sixth seeds shouldn’t win championships. But that’s part of the fun. A playoff can allow for that unforgettable story, like NC State. Last night, during the Orange Bowl, the commentators were going on and on about how this was the University of Cincinnati’s first trip to a major bowl in more than 50 years. But what if they could actually contend for the national title? That’s drama.
There’s no drama in a bunch of exhibition games leading up to a championship between invited guests.
If college football was in a playoff system, then the winner of today’s Liberty Bowl between Kentucky and East Carolina could get on a roll and have one of those unforgettable runs to the finals. I say that, knowing that this season, Kentucky wouldn’t have gotten anywhere near the post season in a playoff system. But the point is, this game would mean something aside from, “Hey, we won the Liberty Bowl” — I’m being optimistic for ya, Wildcats.
You have judged finales in sports like gymnastics, where success is more subjective. Football is not subjective. Teams win by scoring points, moving up in the rankings, entering playoffs against the best teams to determine who wins a championship, all on the field. It’s incredible that the NCAA, the same entity that presents the engrossing spectacle that is the NCAA Basketball Tournament also continually foists this load on its football fans.
President-elect Barack Obama is among those who realize what a joke the NCAA football post season is, and he’s said he’d like to use his influence to get a college football playoff. Certainly, he has bigger knuckleheads than the NCAA overlords to deal with when he gets into office. But, like the economy, college football’s post-season needs to be fixed.
5 Responses to “Seriously, college football, get a playoff”
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Charles Edward Pogue January 2nd, 2009 at 10:17 am
Gee, Rich, you mean the Bowl games are over-hyped and many are meaningless? All sports are over-hyped and many of their post-seasons meander into meaninglessness and go on far longer than anything has a right to or should.
Me, I avoid the Bowl season all together, as well as the regular football season, basketball season, and the baseball season once the Reds have usually broken my heart somewhere well before the All-star break. I don’t think I’ve opened the Herald-Leader Sports section since the Kentucky Derby.
I had a great New Year’s Day watching vintage screwball comedies on Turner Classic Movies. Some obscure football game between two obscure colleges or Gary Grant, Irene Dunne, and scintillating comedy…no contest for me!
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Rich Copley January 2nd, 2009 at 10:45 am
I totally agree, Chuck, that the irrelevant college football post season did nothing to ruin my New Year’s day. There is plenty around my house to occupy my time. I’m just saying I could be interested were there more to college football’s post season than several dozen irrelevant exhibition games followed by a joke of a championship between preordained foes. Of course, some may say the BCS is doing just fine, but judging by ticket sales and ratings, not so much: http://thequad.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/31/no-buzz-for-orange-bowl/
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Charles Edward Pogue January 2nd, 2009 at 10:55 am
When you’ve got a 150 channels, a good percentage of them sports channels, and many of them on 24-hours a day, you can only fill that time with a lot of over-hyped irrelevancies made to seem far more crucial and important than they are. The 24-hour news stations do the same thing.
What amazes me is we have all these stations filling their hours with irrelevancy or re-runs of re-runs of re-runs, we have a Golf channel, for God’s sake.,…but we can’t get one TV channel devoted to real Arts programming. Remember when Bravo used to show plays, ballet, concerts, and foreign films and the Arts & Entertainment channel used to actually have Arts and Entertainment on it?
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Rich, I have the perfect solution to this mess. We don’t have to change how the BCS works. The ideal situation is impossible. So we have to compromise in between, and here we go.
First, make the Sun Bowl a BCS bowl. It’s one of the oldest, so the traditionalists get their way. Keep the automatic BCS bids for conference champions of the big 6 conferences, structured like this:
Rose- Pac 10 and Big 10
Fiesta- Big 12
Sugar- SEC
Orange- Big East
Sun- ACCThe conference champions always advance. Those four open spots? Well, there are 5 non bcs conferences out there, let the highest ranked 4 of those champions advance to play the conference champions in those remaining 4 bowls.
But what about Notre Dame? If any independent is ranked higher than 3 of the 6 BCS conference champions, and is ranked ahead of 3 non BCS conference champions, then they get a spot and only 3 non bcs conference champs advance. Done.
Now, all other bowls remain exactly the same. Only they won’t be useless. Conference champions will root for the teams in their conference to do well, thus making their Strength of Schedule seem harder. Have these 5 BCS bowls be played the last 5 days of the bowl season, around new years. Once they and all other bowls are played, have the BCS rerank all the teams.
Now you take one and two and have a title game. You had a postseason of sorts, and conference champions all squared off against each other. Everyone had to beat a good team. We can also measure which conferences were strongest (like Pac 10 and SEC this year.) Then we can get a clearer picture of who the top teams in the country are. Then we can have a title game between two teams who played to get there, even if it was only one post season game.
How does that sound?
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Just found your blog post in a blog finder tool and I loved it! I run a college football blog and we are all about a playoff. But, “payday loans” says the plus one model is legit, I doubt it. Pac 10 champ playing the Big 10 champ is a much tougher game than the SEC champ taking on the mighty Sun Belt champ. Just not realistic.
The only way to crown a champion is through a playoff. That’s it. If there is no playoff, then there should be no champion. Its ridiculous that Florida and Oklahoma, both one loss teams, got to play for that title. USC and Penn State each lost one game, but no one crowned USC the champion? Utah beat a one-loss team and went undefeated, where’s the love? Where’s the fairness in that?
No playoff, no champion. Simple as that. Let whoever wants to play in a bowl game play whoever. that’s fine and well. But don’t feed us the bull crap that any game is a championship because a bunch of sportswriters and coaches teamed with computers picked two teams to be there.
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