I have been watching football since I was a child and for as long as I can remember, there has always been a debate about whether college football should have a playoff system much like every other sport in America, (and even most of the world). Even President Obama got into the mix on this issue by publicly stating that college football should have a playoff. On the surface, you would have to admit that the college football system does appear to be antiquated. Crowning a national champion involves computer rankings, polls consisting of journalists and former coaches, officiating and the mistakes of those officiators. Wouldn't it be simpler to just have a playoff where there is little debate at the end about who is the Champion? There are quite a few examples of injustices. The Auburn Tigers of 2004 went undefeated and were denied a chance to compete for a National Championship because both Texas and USC were ranked higher than they were and also went undefeated. Texas claimed the National Title and Auburn, unable to compete, had to settle for a final season #2 ranking.
Since the early days of college football there have been vast improvements on fixing these inequities. The latest attempt to try and guarantee a true national champion is the Bowl Championship Series better known as the BCS. The BCS has gotten better through the years but in its early phase it relied too heavily on computer ratings which took into account at various times, strength of opponent, margin of victory, and even applied those to the opponents themselves. Those computer ratings led to some strange results. It would not be uncommon in the early days of the BCS for the national championship game to be determined by two four win teams because one of those four win teams played someone hoping to get the championship game and their win or loss could positively or negatively affect another team solely based on their meeting two months prior. During this time, I commonly abbreviated BCS by leaving out the middle "C" and wondered out loud to anyone who would listen why we shouldn't just scrap college football altogether and simply have each school get their best video game player to compete against other schools on a Sony Playstation to decide college football's national championship. I was one of many fans who were fed up but it wasn't just the fans. The sportswriters who comprised the Associated Press poll demanded that their poll, (the most respected poll in college football), not be used in the calculation of the BCS's determination of who should play for the national championship.
To give the architects of the BCS their due, they have tinkered each year in the hopes of improving the BCS system and their work has shown vast improvement. You could argue that in the last few years, not only has the BCS system worked but it has finally done what it was intended to do in the first place, which was to right the inequities of the system that preceded it. The system before it was essentially bowl matchups governed by contracts that failed to put the top teams against each other more often than not and then expected voters to put aside their regional biases to declare one of those bowl winners a national champion. If the BCS still has one big argument against it, it would be that teams who are not from major conferences have little chance of making it into a national championship game. Teams such as Boise State have consistently been snubbed for any shot at a national championship game. In defense of this snubbing though, Boise State does not play against the same kind of competition that an Alabama, Oklahoma or Oregon faces on an almost weekly basis. Those lines are getting blurred though. I don't know that the same argument could be said of The Big East which is a BCS conference.
At this point, it would seem not only obvious that college football should have a playoff but that it is almost criminal that it lacks a clearly defined playoff system. The problem though is that a playoff doesn't simply right the ship like it would in other sports. Let's take a look at two places where a playoff system works and compare them to the college football world. The most obvious place to look is the National Football League. I don't think fans would be clamoring to end the NFL playoffs in support of a system of polls. Here though, there is a good argument for why it works in the NFL but would not work in college. It's simply the amount of teams. Currently the NFL has thirty-two teams. Now compare that number to FBS college teams, (formerly Division 1-A), in which there are 120 FBS teams. Even assuming that that you realign all the FBS teams into super conferences with divisions and sub conferences, there is no way that enough of these teams can play against each other to not have inequities in a playoff system as bad if not worse than the ones that already exist. This gets us to our next comparison which would be the NCAA sixty-four team basketall playoff. Here one could point out that you can do a playoff system with the 120 FBS teams because it is already done in basketball and is done well. The problem that you have with this is that we are talking football and not basketball. It's not feasible to have a sixty-four team playoff because it can't be done in the same amount of time. To have a sixty-four team playoff would extend the college football season out longer than it should be. In that case, we could reduce the playoffs to a smaller number. Again, we head down a slippery slope. Each year the NCAA basketball selection committee is second guessed on how they picked the sixty-four team field. The controversy is minor because with so many teams competing, it is hard to believe that the few bubble teams that don't get selected would have won the championship. However that controversy grows exponentially every time you reduce the playoff field. In the end, if you get it down to a reasonable number such as four, you have simply switched out a poll or a BCS system for a selection committee and that committee would be no less arbitrary than the system you have in place.
So what's the answer? To me, it's simple. Leave it alone. It's actually not a broken system as everyone would have you to believe. There are times when you can point to controversy but every sport has controversy. It could be worse. It could be as bad as eastern European Olympic judges or the horrendous officiating that takes place at the World Cup every four years. All of these controversies a small when you compare them to what you would lose. Let's go back to the NFL for a comparison. Your favorite team loses in Week 1. Is the season over? Not by a long shot. Everything still shimmers in front of you. In college football, a Week 1 loss can end it all. At the beginning of this season, Louisiana State played Oregon. Louisiana State won and Oregon lost. That Week 1 loss may have cost Oregon their shot at a national title this year. That isn't a bad thing, that's a good thing. College football demands perfection more than any other sport. Invariably, at the end of a season, there is always a large possibility that we will be left with a group of one loss teams and that only two of them will get a chance to play in the national championship game. Is this a controversy? To some yes--to me no. Each of those teams gave up their right to complain when they lost that one game. Only teams that finish with perfect records have a real gripe and even those teams need to be able to make an argument that they played a tough schedule. No one is going to put up with a team playing ten patsies, one mediocre team, and one good team as an argument for a right to play in the national championship game.
Normally when I talk to people who are very bothered by the lack of a college football playoff, I quickly find out that they don't actually watch a lot of college football. They look at the surface issues and ignore the idiosyncratic aspects of college football that makes the sport great. Frequently they are huge fans of Pro Football who consider college football to be the equivalent of junior varsity play to Pro Football's varsity play. Yet, almost nowhere but in the playoffs does pro football demand perfection and even when it does, it demands it out of seasoned veterans. To me, there is something beautiful that an entire team's hopes for the year can ride on one fourth quarter play by an eighteen year old kid who is only a few months removed from playing high school football. That is college football and that is why college football should never succumb to a playoff system but it is also why college football should always strive to improve it's game without surrendering what makes it unique.
Since the early days of college football there have been vast improvements on fixing these inequities. The latest attempt to try and guarantee a true national champion is the Bowl Championship Series better known as the BCS. The BCS has gotten better through the years but in its early phase it relied too heavily on computer ratings which took into account at various times, strength of opponent, margin of victory, and even applied those to the opponents themselves. Those computer ratings led to some strange results. It would not be uncommon in the early days of the BCS for the national championship game to be determined by two four win teams because one of those four win teams played someone hoping to get the championship game and their win or loss could positively or negatively affect another team solely based on their meeting two months prior. During this time, I commonly abbreviated BCS by leaving out the middle "C" and wondered out loud to anyone who would listen why we shouldn't just scrap college football altogether and simply have each school get their best video game player to compete against other schools on a Sony Playstation to decide college football's national championship. I was one of many fans who were fed up but it wasn't just the fans. The sportswriters who comprised the Associated Press poll demanded that their poll, (the most respected poll in college football), not be used in the calculation of the BCS's determination of who should play for the national championship.
To give the architects of the BCS their due, they have tinkered each year in the hopes of improving the BCS system and their work has shown vast improvement. You could argue that in the last few years, not only has the BCS system worked but it has finally done what it was intended to do in the first place, which was to right the inequities of the system that preceded it. The system before it was essentially bowl matchups governed by contracts that failed to put the top teams against each other more often than not and then expected voters to put aside their regional biases to declare one of those bowl winners a national champion. If the BCS still has one big argument against it, it would be that teams who are not from major conferences have little chance of making it into a national championship game. Teams such as Boise State have consistently been snubbed for any shot at a national championship game. In defense of this snubbing though, Boise State does not play against the same kind of competition that an Alabama, Oklahoma or Oregon faces on an almost weekly basis. Those lines are getting blurred though. I don't know that the same argument could be said of The Big East which is a BCS conference.
At this point, it would seem not only obvious that college football should have a playoff but that it is almost criminal that it lacks a clearly defined playoff system. The problem though is that a playoff doesn't simply right the ship like it would in other sports. Let's take a look at two places where a playoff system works and compare them to the college football world. The most obvious place to look is the National Football League. I don't think fans would be clamoring to end the NFL playoffs in support of a system of polls. Here though, there is a good argument for why it works in the NFL but would not work in college. It's simply the amount of teams. Currently the NFL has thirty-two teams. Now compare that number to FBS college teams, (formerly Division 1-A), in which there are 120 FBS teams. Even assuming that that you realign all the FBS teams into super conferences with divisions and sub conferences, there is no way that enough of these teams can play against each other to not have inequities in a playoff system as bad if not worse than the ones that already exist. This gets us to our next comparison which would be the NCAA sixty-four team basketall playoff. Here one could point out that you can do a playoff system with the 120 FBS teams because it is already done in basketball and is done well. The problem that you have with this is that we are talking football and not basketball. It's not feasible to have a sixty-four team playoff because it can't be done in the same amount of time. To have a sixty-four team playoff would extend the college football season out longer than it should be. In that case, we could reduce the playoffs to a smaller number. Again, we head down a slippery slope. Each year the NCAA basketball selection committee is second guessed on how they picked the sixty-four team field. The controversy is minor because with so many teams competing, it is hard to believe that the few bubble teams that don't get selected would have won the championship. However that controversy grows exponentially every time you reduce the playoff field. In the end, if you get it down to a reasonable number such as four, you have simply switched out a poll or a BCS system for a selection committee and that committee would be no less arbitrary than the system you have in place.
So what's the answer? To me, it's simple. Leave it alone. It's actually not a broken system as everyone would have you to believe. There are times when you can point to controversy but every sport has controversy. It could be worse. It could be as bad as eastern European Olympic judges or the horrendous officiating that takes place at the World Cup every four years. All of these controversies a small when you compare them to what you would lose. Let's go back to the NFL for a comparison. Your favorite team loses in Week 1. Is the season over? Not by a long shot. Everything still shimmers in front of you. In college football, a Week 1 loss can end it all. At the beginning of this season, Louisiana State played Oregon. Louisiana State won and Oregon lost. That Week 1 loss may have cost Oregon their shot at a national title this year. That isn't a bad thing, that's a good thing. College football demands perfection more than any other sport. Invariably, at the end of a season, there is always a large possibility that we will be left with a group of one loss teams and that only two of them will get a chance to play in the national championship game. Is this a controversy? To some yes--to me no. Each of those teams gave up their right to complain when they lost that one game. Only teams that finish with perfect records have a real gripe and even those teams need to be able to make an argument that they played a tough schedule. No one is going to put up with a team playing ten patsies, one mediocre team, and one good team as an argument for a right to play in the national championship game.
Normally when I talk to people who are very bothered by the lack of a college football playoff, I quickly find out that they don't actually watch a lot of college football. They look at the surface issues and ignore the idiosyncratic aspects of college football that makes the sport great. Frequently they are huge fans of Pro Football who consider college football to be the equivalent of junior varsity play to Pro Football's varsity play. Yet, almost nowhere but in the playoffs does pro football demand perfection and even when it does, it demands it out of seasoned veterans. To me, there is something beautiful that an entire team's hopes for the year can ride on one fourth quarter play by an eighteen year old kid who is only a few months removed from playing high school football. That is college football and that is why college football should never succumb to a playoff system but it is also why college football should always strive to improve it's game without surrendering what makes it unique.
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