What are you going to do about it? Every year its guesses which team is the best. Some years it's right, other years it's the judge in a beauty contest, as objective as ice skating. But right now, you'll eat its outcomes and like it. You'll sit there and watch USC kick Illinois in the groin. You'll watch Marcus Howard try to kill Colt Brennan by putting his helmet through his chest. What choice do you have? It's not like it's going anywhere. It has powerful friends. Friends in high places. Friends that will defend it to the end. Way more powerful than you and your friends. After all, the BCS is rich and popular with the people who count, bow-tie wearing, bespectacled academics. Everybody that matters is fat and happy. Don't make the BCS steal your girlfriend just to show you that it can.
The BCS and its buddies make perfect sense. You can't demand an additional game out of two teams! How will their athletes possibly go to class? I mean they already play twelve games on Saturdays during the fall semester. (They used to play 11, but those university presidents and commissioners thought another game would add to the drama of the regular season. Nothing is more dramatic than that twelfth game against Western Carolina.) Then most of those BCS conferences play a conference championship game, also on a weekend. (These are not playoff games, mind you. They are championship games.) Look, you can't have college football players missing class like college basketball or college baseball players. I mean these are the BCS conferences! We take academics seriously. Not like theIvy League or the Patriot League who allow its teams to participate in a barbaric sixteen team playoff. Or the schools of Division III, who subject their students to a mind-numbing thirty-two team playoff for diploma mills like Williams, Johns Hopkins, Amherst, and Washington University.
Plus, who will even watch the regular season if there is a four team playoff? Games like Georgia v. Florida, Georgia v. Tennessee, and Georgia v. Auburn would lose all relevance. Would anyone even show up to watch those games? Probably not if you are just going to let all those teams into a playoff at the end of the year. There's drama when two teams get into a playoff, but none if you allow four. Sometimes there's controversy about the two that play for the championship, but everyone reaches consensus after such an elegant process determines the best team in the land.
Look, college football is thriving. It's thriving because of the BCS, not in spite of it. The BCS has given you so much. (How thrilling was watching Charlie Weiss get his brains beat in by JaMarcus Russell and LSU in 2006?) And you want to destroy it for something that will ABSOLUTELY RUIN your favorite sport. Well, suck it dork. The BCS owns you and will continue to for years to come. Learn to love it.
Quinton
The BCS and its buddies make perfect sense. You can't demand an additional game out of two teams! How will their athletes possibly go to class? I mean they already play twelve games on Saturdays during the fall semester. (They used to play 11, but those university presidents and commissioners thought another game would add to the drama of the regular season. Nothing is more dramatic than that twelfth game against Western Carolina.) Then most of those BCS conferences play a conference championship game, also on a weekend. (These are not playoff games, mind you. They are championship games.) Look, you can't have college football players missing class like college basketball or college baseball players. I mean these are the BCS conferences! We take academics seriously. Not like the
Plus, who will even watch the regular season if there is a four team playoff? Games like Georgia v. Florida, Georgia v. Tennessee, and Georgia v. Auburn would lose all relevance. Would anyone even show up to watch those games? Probably not if you are just going to let all those teams into a playoff at the end of the year. There's drama when two teams get into a playoff, but none if you allow four. Sometimes there's controversy about the two that play for the championship, but everyone reaches consensus after such an elegant process determines the best team in the land.
Look, college football is thriving. It's thriving because of the BCS, not in spite of it. The BCS has given you so much. (How thrilling was watching Charlie Weiss get his brains beat in by JaMarcus Russell and LSU in 2006?) And you want to destroy it for something that will ABSOLUTELY RUIN your favorite sport. Well, suck it dork. The BCS owns you and will continue to for years to come. Learn to love it.
Quinton
14 comments:
Make that 20 teams in the I-AA (bite me, NCAA) playoffs, starting in 2010.
http://64.246.64.33/merge/tsnform.aspx?c=sportsnetwork&page=cfoot2/news/news.aspx?id=4146516
Also, the Ivy League doesn't participate.
If you like big business dictating your football, then you are right Quinton. Personally, I could absolutely see winners of the BCS Bowls going on for a smaller play-off system to truly illustrate the best team. The regular season would still be crucial to gaining a spot in a BCS game, then the winners continue. Simple, sweet, and helps take out the ESPN beauty contest that we deal with every damn season.
Somehow I've always imagined that is exactly what those meetings kind of sound like. The only real option we have as fans is to boycott our teams, which is far more punishment on ourselves and the teams we support than on the BCS big wigs.
I've long been a believer that if schools contending for the national title on a consistent basis played their out of conference peers on a consistent basis, nobody would care that we don't have a playoff. Unfortunately, the pollsters are so wrapped up in wins they punish teams for doing this.
That being said, the floodgates are open. We have a two-team playoff. It's only a matter of time until that expands. You wait until Jerry Jones' new stadium is complete and he wants to make the "Cotton Bowl" relevant again. I'd wager that's when you'll see the first Plus 1 since it would be worth far more money than a 5th non-title-game BCS Bowl.
Suck it, dork, indeed.
I have always thought the argument that the regular season won't matter if there's a playoff is ridiculous. For example, South Carolina fans have no hope - none, ever - of winning a damn thing in football. And yet, they show up and pack the upside down cockroach and watch their team lose every chance they get.
Do these asshats really mean to try to convince us that, if by some divine intervention, we all of a sudden had a 32 team playoff in college football, that South Carolina fans would stop going to the dead roach and getting drunk in their little train outside?
Are you freaking kidding me?
What the hell else do those people have to do?
Come the "F" on. It is about the money. Everything has a price and the market for college football simply has not pushed the playoff over the top of the BCS to date.
Jerry Jones is going to save us all haha.
College football does have the best regular season of all sports. I don't want to mess that up. I would be for a 4, 6 or 8team playoff. If it went larger than that I would be afraid it would turn into the last two weeks of the NFL where teams are resting starters, etc.
The BCS big boys are also afraid of giving any ground. They know that once they give an inch, they'll have to start giving yards. Look at the college basketball bracket. It was 32 teams until 1985, then it became 64 because 32 wasn't enough. Then it becamse 65 with a play-in game because 64 wasn't enough. They know that if they agree to a four-team play-off, the demand for more teams will only increase.
Personnally, I'd like to see an eight-team play-off with the six major conference winners and two at-large bids.
I have mixed feelings about the BCS. I like the idea and it has set up #1 and #2 in most years that otherwise would not have come to pass "back in the day".
I could live with a playoff, but as noted attendance and interest is high. If you are really committed to a playoff, then you should be willing to make sacrifices for your belief. Otherwise you are a RV playoff supporter. Here is what you should do if you have the courage of your convictions:
1) Do not buy tickets to games or make donations to the University and let the president and AD know that until there is a playoff you will not donate or buy tickets.
2) Stop attending games even if the tickets are given to you.
3) Stop buying products that support the games, especially the bowl games. You are feeding the monster. So no more of the beers or Tostitos and no more Allstate insurance (even if it means paying a higher insurance rate). You also need to write the sponsors to let them know you are boycotting their products.
4) Stop watching all college games on TV. People complain that ESPN has too much power (or Fox) and yet you watch the shows. Let ESPN and Fox (and the others know you are boycotting).
So who is will to stand up and do something other than posting on a blog or calling into some idiots on a sports talk radio show (perhaps the dumbest people on the planet).
I wonder, if the polling and voting on a champion works so well with college football, why not do with all other sports?
Stanley Cup
March Madness
Super Bowl
World Series
NBA Finals
All of em. The hell with letting games be played to decide a champ, let's just vote on it!
I said my peace. People should stop acting as if they are surprised.
Anon (the most recent one),
Why does every sport have to be the same? What kind of argument is this?
I also would be fine, I would even prefer, a "plus one" with the top 4 playing each other for the champ. If it went to 8, I could live with that. But people who worry about the regular season being corrupted by anything bigger than that are absolutely right.
Frankly, some of the comments here make me wanna go Joe McCarthy. You all sound like a bunch of soccer fans (or something) who have infiltrated the blogs of decent, pigskin-loving red-blooded American fans to spout your propaganda. Anyone who says that a 32 team playoff wouldn't effect the regular season is either a. lying, or b. is not actually a college football fan and has never actaully payed attention to the regular season.
Turn yourselves in, commies. The game is up. And give us the names of your friends, too.
the problem with college football isn't the BCS or lack of a playoff.
The problem is the # of teams who avoid more than 1-3 meaningful match-ups per year. Therefore, you have no real idea who is or isn't better. And a playoff wouldn't solve that problem because someone would have to be SEEDED into that process by a computer, vote or committee. The 3 things BCS opponents hate about the BCS.
If I were running things, I would:
1. Drop the bottom 20 teams in Div I football.
2. Div I-AA games would only count towards bowl eligibility once every 4 years. That would eliminate teams like FSU and GT playing two in a year.
3. Force every conference to have at least 12 members and a championship game.
4. #1 and #2 would combine to eliminate 100-150 completely worthless games per year. Thus creating a trickle up process where by teams were forced to play better competition.
The current product is far, far to watered down. That's the real enemy of college football. Not the playoff.
I believe the simplest and most lucrative NCAA championship plan is to have the team with the best record in the Big Ten play a team hand-picked by the ESPN gameday panel.
To hell with the panel, let's just ask Mark May.
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