We Should Unfix the College Football Postseason: A Rebuttal
Will Truman offered his opinion and correctives regarding the college football post season last week here at Ordinary Times in his article “Fixing The College Football Postseason.” It was more nuanced than many arguments for the same but the gist was that the playoffs are in need of expansion. We agree in that we both opposed the creation of a playoff and were fans of the old bowl system. Our disagreement comes in how to go forward now that we have the current mess I (I assume he did too) warned against.
My opinion is that we go back to either a BCS 1 vs 2 system or return to the bowl system. He argues that that ship has sailed and that we should accept expansion and consider ways to mitigate problems that might arise. He writes that a twelve team tournament would be best path forward. He was measured and considered, but I’m afraid I disagree. There are throngs that do agree with him but wrong can be cumulative and fair observers can be mistaken most often when they are fair observers not named me. Occasionally I fix things.
I have written about this in the past at rollbamaroll.com and was looking at a way to build on what I’ve previously written but then, out of the ether, Erik Evans, also of rollbamaroll.com, posted last Thursday (1/13) in a brilliantly lawyerly and straightforward way. I’m a rambler. I go for tangents when writing and like to play with ideas that touch on a theme and then get to talk about a turkey sandwich or something while claiming relevance and hinting about the thrust of an article without getting too far from my point.
Attorneys don’t do that. From Erik the Straightforward Esq. Evans about the college football playoff and ideas of expansion of such:
“If one thing has been abundantly clear in this miserable experiment, it’s that rarely are there four teams worthy of playing for a title, much less eight or 12. The vast majority of semifinals contests have been blowouts. And the title game has produced a few thrilling results, but the majority of those have also been decided by double digits.”
For those angling at playoff expansion, Evans is cuttingly right.
We have had sixteen semifinals and only four have been decided by less than two scores and none of those four have been in the same year. The playoff expansionists want to open the door to worthy competition without recognizing that it has been open and that there is a supply problem on the worthy end.
At best we have had three teams that might contend. A 2004 Auburn may see this as an improvement over the BCS – which pretty much got things right – but for the rest of us, the playoff semifinals have been an opportunity for the two obviously best teams to amass injuries.
I’d like to go back to the bowl system myself. College football was never meant to produce a champion. You had a PAC 12 (I’m using current conference titles) and a Big10 and an SEC champion and all the rest and they were happy. You won your league and you were done. They played a bowl exhibition against each other and the rubes from Birmingham got to eat tiny portions in Los Angeles and the rivetters from Michigan got to sweat out a Florida December. Bowls were amazing vacations and that was that.
The AP decided in 1936 that it might be fun to vote on who they think the best team in the nation is. In 1965, they started voting on the final rankings after bowl games.
They used to award the mythical national championship, because it was a vote among regional sports writers who occasionally read AP stories about other teams from a few thousand miles away from other regional writers who maybe saw one or two of the far aways’ highlights on ABC’s Wild World of Sports, and that was the blossom of glorious arguments that last until this day. I have a book on my shelf called The Forgotten Ring because in 1966 a bunch of whiskified newspaper pundits gave Notre Dame a vote over my beloved Crimson Tide and to their shame, that nonsensical decision has been defended. Those were the halcyon days of fandom.
I was hours away from going to the Sugar Bowl on January 1, 1993. We were down for New Years Eve and a buddy was a student at Tulane and he rented a really big house that was right up on a levee on, I think, St. Paul’s. There were so many of us crashing at his place that I slept on a pool table. We had pretty much no money and though our friend had tickets to the game none of the rest of us did so the idea was that if we couldn’t get tickets that we could afford (impossible as pauper college kids) within the NOLA to Bham road trip time frame, we would blitz back from New Orleans to Birmingham to watch because our host was going into the stadium and we were locked out of his really big house with the comfy pool table and we absolutely were going to watch that game.
We couldn’t get tickets. We blitzed from Louisiana up 20/59 and hit my parents’ driveway just in time to storm the tv (television) room at kickoff. I don’t mean right before kickoff. We drove six hours to precision. At kickoff. Perfectly.
Before that year, we had all manner of number 5 versus number 2 and maybe number 1 fell to number 5 or 6 of a tied-in-conference or some such and bowl games were fun. There was always the chance that if the cards fell right number 4 or higher might get voted in as number 1 when the dust cleared. 1993 was Alabama at number 2 versus Miami at number 1 and it set off dollar sign hopefuls all over the nation.
That’s what spawned the BCS. Number 1 vs. number 2. Every year. I prefer the bowl system, but compared to what we have now, I miss the BCS. They largely got it right, 2004 Auburn withstanding. I miss the chaos of the bowls. Nursed slights among fans might last for decades. That’s what we lived for.
We don’t get that anymore. Trying to fix things moved the argument from who should be number one to who should be number two, and number three to who should be number four and number five. The proposals that want to grow this thing are just moving the argument to who should be number eight and number nine or number twelve and number thirteen, and every one of those discussions is by degrees bland in comparison to what was. No one will be satisfied. I can already hear calls to bring in thirty-two teams.
In my opinion, arguments to expand the playoffs fall flat with most college fans but resonate with sports fans in general. Will [Edit: or Truman depending on how formal you want me to be – I’ve never communicated with him] writes that “For the longest time, it was the only major sport at any level without any sort of playoff system, wherein the champions were decided by news reporters and polling coaches.” He’s right about the reporters and coaches but not about college football being alone in not having a playoff system at any level.
Look beyond the United States and you’ll find that in almost every nation the most popular sport in the world doesn’t have one. Sure, there are tournaments. Using England as an example, there’s the FA Cup and the winner of the FA cup is just that: the winner of the FA cup. English teams can compete in the Champions League and play against teams from all over Europe. The winner of the Champions League influences the winner of the regular season not one whit. The winner of the regular season is The English Premier League Champion, full stop.
The most popular sport in the world and the sport with the most impassioned fanbases in the United States had one thing in common. The regular season is supreme. Every game can make or break that season. It was glorious.
We haven’t completely lost that gloriousness, we just kinda dinged it. The fear among my stamp of college football fans is that the tournament awards the game and not the campaign, and going to eight or twelve in the final season makes everything worse. As I wrote last June of the 2007 NFL postseason:
“The Pats lost one game. Just one. The Giants lost a gaggle of games, including one to the Patriots. But the latter-day Giants beat the then-undefeated Patriots and had not only their loss to the Patriots excised, but their losses to the Cowboys, Packers, Cowboys again, Vikings, [REDACTED], and then the Patriots. The Giants drew with the Patriots and also lost to four other teams (one twice) but… tournament. So the team that only lost one game is not the champ. All hail the champion that lost three games in their own division. Tournaments rock?”
Pro fans will tell you that the Giants won when it matters. College fans will point out that means there are games that don’t matter. Before people bring up cupcake games, I’m all for them and for a myriad of reasons that would fill another column, but I’ll quote Gene Stallings in response to a reporter: “If you think there is such a thing as an unimportant game, just try losing one.” That’s the season I want. They all matter. That doesn’t mean you can’t have a loss, but in deciding who gets the Mythical NC, or who plays in the BCS, or gets a spot in the CFB Playoff, body of work matters.
I like how Will [edit – or Truman] approached the inclusion of conference champions by requiring that any champion to be included in the playoffs should win eight conference games and twelve against FBS teams. I still disagree, but I’m glad to see someone addressing the idea that a conference champion might be ranked 22 or something like that and leaving out a great non-conference champion team with a consistent record would be awful. I don’t like the twelve FBS rule because FCS match ups provide opportunities for younger players to get a feel for a live game, give parents like me a way to let our kids taste what fandom can be like without spending hundreds of dollars on a ticket for a kid to get hot dogs every thirty minutes and go to the bathroom every five, and most importantly these games provide payouts to the less competitive school. These payoffs don’t just help the football team at Directional Padooka State; they make up a great deal of the budget for whole athletic departments. They pay scholarships for untold student athletes. We might cynically lose sight of it, but the goal of the NCAA is education and the FCS vs FBS games advance that goal. Forcing FBS teams to abandon either those games or hopes at a postseason is harmful to that end.
I’ve also got a problem with the automatic inclusion of conference champions because the BIG10 got really hinky last year. They started with Covid rules that would only allow teams that played five games to play in their championship game. That was until their highest ranked team had its last game against Michigan cancelled due to Covid, leaving Ohio State with a 5-0 record. That should have sent Indiana at 6-1 into the game against a likely overmatched Northwestern, but Ohio State had the best chance, said those in the know, so the rule was changed, Indiana was not allowed to play, and Ohio State moved on. Indiana played in the Outback Bowl without the traditional BIG10 patches on their jerseys and stickers on their helmets in protest. Good for the Hoosiers.
This calls into question what a conference champion is. We could end up with the winner of the SEC, the ACC, the Big12, the PAC12, and whatever team the BIG10 believes gives them the best chance at playoff money despite the outcome of games and their rules. That’s assuming that the other conferences won’t decide that the team deemed most likely to succeed will serve them better and follow the BIG10’s lead.
There’s a feeling that once something expands it’s impossible to return it to what it was before. I don’t know. I had a friend, now deceased, that started a café intending it to be a calm, cool place with jazz and Motown/Atlantic Rhythm and Blues playing, and light fare, but it was too close to a few UAB frat houses which I didn’t even realize existed. His place was raucous and making money hand over foot. The menu expanded to all manner of appetizers and easy late-night bites and he was loving the success, but one day he remembered why he opened the place. He told his bartenders that they weren’t to serve shots anymore. Turns out if you refuse to serve shots, frat boys go elsewhere. He didn’t have to change the music because it was always jazz interspersed with Otis Redding et al. but the crowds were so loud nobody could hear. He pared down the menu and returned to just quality soup and sandwiches and it took a while, but the cafe flourished in the ways he’d hoped.
As I said he died, but the place was purchased by former employees and they changed nothing. Great drinks, quality food, and a friendly staff in an off-beat setting. To this day it still has the best turkey sandwich I’ve ever had.
You can go back. You can contract. Maybe it’s to the BCS. Maybe we double down and it’s the bowl system. But Erik is right. This has been a miserable experiment.
I am sympathetic to this view, even for various reasons (most of them in my original post) I don’t agree with it (or don’t agree with its viability).
I did want to comment on the lopsided games. I think what’s missing is the extent to which the current system itself likely produces those games, and that a different system would more likely produce different games. Since talent goes where talent wants to go, and talent wants to go to winners, it creates a situation where *very* few teams suction up the talent that wants to play for championship-caliber teams. So you end up with a system where one or two teams are just head and shoulders above the rest.
If you look below those two, you see a lot more parity. The major bowls this year were extremely competitive. Those twelve teams in a playoff would have produced a lot of good games, and that’s even allowing for the fact that there were two teams that were a cut above the rest. In years past, it worked to just let those teams play those games in an informal system, but in the system we have the top players and coaches have checked out. So every game comes with an asterisk as to who was there and who declared for the NFL draft or portal. Bowls used to be a way to measure up teams and conferences, but are now a measurement of circumstance and at best depth (how good is the QB who never snapped a down during the season?).
So, to me, there’s no way forward but forward.
That said, I agree with a lot of this and in an ideal world I’d (still) be supportive of it. I like the parts about European systems even if I don’t think they’re workable here (like promotion-relegation… a wonderful system I’d be thrilled for us to adopt, but things here are just not wired that way). One of the main reasons I want to keep the bowl games and to avoid doing straight-up seeding. You have the individual games that can straight up mean something for the teams that aren’t NCG-bound. But for those that don’t understand or appreciate games outside that context, it has something for them, too. I just think that’s the best we can do right now.Report
The obvious solution to one team, or even conference, sucking up all the talent is to reduce the number of scholarships available. Currently, the limit is 85. NFL teams get by with 53. I imagine Alabama, and its ilk, have many players on their depth charts who could easily be starters elsewhere. A lower limit would definitely make for more competition.Report
This is a great point. It would have a salary-cap like effect on the sport. It will never happen, but it’s a great idea.Report
With NIL that’s a lot less of an issue than it used to be.
BYU and boosters are setting up an NIL system wherein walk-ons basically get their tuition paid for by endorsing products (provided they’re willing to do so). Unless the NCAA somehow prohibits that, I expect that to become common-place soon.Report
Then it becomes a booster arms race. There probably isn’t a way around this, but from what I see the deepest pockets are the ones who are already loaded with talent.Report
The obvious solution is a promotion-relegation system. The conferences become the many tiers of college football, with everyone trying to get promoted to the SEC, and then trying to stay there. Obviously, this is very bad for Vanderbilt, Kentucky, and a few other teams, who’ve been in the SEC for decades, but who will probably find themselves in the Sun Belt after being relegated a few seasons in a row, but that’s what fairness demands.
We can do this for basketball, as well. Obviously, this means no cinderellas somehow making it within view of a national championship, but it also means the best team will be national champion just about every year (there might, on occasion, be a 2015-16 Leicester City, which will be very exciting for everyone except the best teams), and every game really will matter.Report
Will there be more money in that?Report
Promotion-relegation would wreck havoc on every athletic conference, destabilize every other D1 sport and not solve the problem of having a few super teams competing for a national championship in football.Report
To be clear, I’m being facetious. I’d hoped making the SEC the be-all, end-all of college football would make that clear.
College sports, and football in particular, is an inherently unfair system; layer upon layer of unfairness, sustained by the fact that the unfairness makes some people a whole lot of money. There is only one way to fix college sports: eliminate them.Report
Instead of “obvious solution,” you should have offered a modest proposal. I read a lot of relegation stuff on baseball blogs that seems to be completely disconnected with how the farm systems work. Also something about harvesting Notre Dame babies.Report
Argh, yes, a modest proposal would have been a better way of staring.
And I’m intrigued by the idea of harvesting Notre Dame babies.Report
This, of course, assumes the Indiana Irish are indeed human.Report
Admittedly a hotly debated topic among my Pennsylvania Italian relatives.Report
What you consider sarcasm would get 2 hours of serious discussion on Paul Finebaum’s SEC radio program.Report
““If one thing has been abundantly clear in this miserable experiment, it’s that rarely are there four teams worthy of playing for a title, much less eight or 12. The vast majority of semifinals contests have been blowouts. And the title game has produced a few thrilling results, but the majority of those have also been decided by double digits.””
Yea, sure, but… how do we identify who those two teams are? Michigan was rated ahead of Georgia going into the playoffs. If we had a two-team playoffs, the eventual champion would have been left behind. How could we have identified beforehand that they should have been ahead of Michigan?
The 2018 champ (Bama) was ranked 4th in the playoffs.
Last year’s blowouts included a #3 seed over a #2.
When you had just two teams make it, you left open the argument that maybe someone more deserving was left out and never got a chance to show if they should been in or not. Now we can say, “Yea, Cinci, you had your shot and as good as you were, you weren’t #1 material.” If we had a two team model, Cinci (and actual champ Georgia) would still be crowing that they’d have won if given the shot.Report
The thing about the Premier League is, it’s small enough (20 teams) and the sport of soccer isn’t as violent as football, so everybody can play each other twice, so it’s fairly clear after 38 games who the best team is.
OTOH, college football is way too short a season, and even the NFL football season is way too short to determine who’s the best because there’ll be cases where the top teams don’t play each other, etc, so you need some sort of playoff season.
Now, for college football, the way to kind of fix this is bite the bullet, admit there are only a couple of dozen college teams worth anything in the long-term, have a SuperLeague with two 12-team conferences that all play each other once, then have a massive Championship Game, along with some relegation rules.
Outside of that, college teams and more importantly, college football fans are never going to accept going back to the days of PAC 10 vs Big 10, SEC vs. ACC, etc. and more importantly, the secret is that while online and people on TV may sigh and think wistifully about the good ole’ days, there’s a whole generation of fans that have grown up w/ the playoffs and more importantly, TV viewership is still quite big.Report
My husband has watched over 800 people die this year (and this is not counting all the people told they can’t play anymore, and with dramatically decreased life expectancy).
I’m not so sure you really ought to call the Premier League “premier” anymore.Report
Comparing the regular season and post-season feels a little bit like comparing the popular vote and the electoral college.
In major American sports, the goal isn’t to win the regular season; the goal is to win the championship. So, sure, the Pats had a better regular season in 2007. But the Giants won where it mattered most. There was an argument at the time that the Pats should have rested starters down the stretch, risking the chance at perfection to leave them better situated for the playoffs. While they couldn’t have anticipated facing the Giants again, some Giants players have said they learned a lot from that initial meeting that went into their eventual win. Who knows. There are no do-overs.
But American pro sports have pretty clearly decided that the goal isn’t to necessarily crown the absolute best team, but to crown the Champion. College football is in a weird middle ground right now as it tries to determine what the purpose of it’s playoff is (besides generating oodles of money for people who can’t throw a ball two feet).Report
After reading through everything here, put me in the camp that says college football will have to either (a) go back to the bowl/poll arrangement or (b) split off the top level of football and make it independent of the conferences used for all of the other sports. Almost certainly with spending limits of some sort for competitive balance.Report
Semi-related, anyone notice how short the Covid lists got once the NFL/NCAA playoffs started? Hmmm…Report
The NCAA substituted teams in a few cases, and cancelled bowls altogether in a couple. The NFL has — so far — successfully managed to modify their Covid protocols to keep most of the playoff teams intact. Rodgers at Green Bay is still unvaccinated. I’m waiting for him to test positive again and have to sit out a critical game.Report
This coming weekend would be nice.Report