We Should Unfix the College Football Postseason: A Rebuttal

Photo of Pomona College Football 1911. Metate yearbook of Pomona College, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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.