NCAA (US College) Sports
- Thread starter RAFUH
- Start date
That is definitely......something.
TN Toffee
Player Valuation: £20m
Don’t care for this at all. The one thing that always set college football apart was that it had the best, most meaningful regular season in all of American sports.
This cash grab only further devalues it, and the regular season is basically going to become an ever more meaningless exercise and at the end you’ll have entirely undeserving two and three loss teams being given the chance to play for a championship.
This cash grab only further devalues it, and the regular season is basically going to become an ever more meaningless exercise and at the end you’ll have entirely undeserving two and three loss teams being given the chance to play for a championship.
Pittsburgh Footy
Player Valuation: £35m
As a fan of a team outside the college football equivalent of the "Sky 6", I like this a lot. My Panthers would have got into a playoff like this last season, see what my boy Kenny Pickett could do with that team last year with Addison.
This year, Alabama has a real shot at getting into the 4 team playoff with 2 losses. There have been other years where even more deserving 1 loss and "gasp" unbeaten teams should have had their chance at a title. Like, how do you decide between 1 loss teams that play different schedules? It's not as simple as a mathematical strength of schedule and points differential exercise like the computers want it to be.
While I agree with you that you don't want undeserving teams in the mix, the old BCS and now the 4 team playoff still isn't fair to a 1 loss team that's playing great ball who finishes like 6th. I've always been a proponent of a 6 team playoff, but 12 is fine by me - especially now that they don't play all the big bowls on New Year's Day anyway anymore, the big games to me are completely meaningless - at least before you could watch them all on the same day, and as a collective were interesting
TheBigIguana
Player Valuation: £100m
The problem for me is the best two loss team is always Alabama or Ohio State. I get they're talented but way too much of this is perception. At least with 12 teams anyone with a reasonable shot gets in. TCU might miss out this year with 1 loss to Bama with two or OSU with 1 and are they really having a worse season? It doesn't mean they're as good but the games matter right?
Nah, every other college sport, including lower level football, anoints its champion either through playoff/bracket or olympic style competition. It was only ever top level college football which abstained from this normal practice, and *only because* of the cash grab. The playoff is normalizing for CFB, although the cash grab will still exist.
Playoffs will aid diversity of champions. The favorites will always be the favorites, and the best players and coaches will always be hard to beat, but having a bona fide playoff system will help all teams. Imagine what happens to recruiting classes if TCU makes the playoffs 3 consecutive years, etc.
TN Toffee
Player Valuation: £20m
It shouldn’t be a contest of who has the hot hand in January. That’s what made the old system so great. Obviously it was controversial in some years, but EVERY SINGLE weekend felt like it mattered. That’s what I miss, and with the 12 team playoff we’ll be even farther away from that. Especially for SEC teams, as long as you don’t lose more than three games, you’ll probably be set.
The old system was all schedule loading and did you win your 1 or 2 hard games. "Weak" teams like Boise couldn't get good opponents and were formulaically eliminated from good bowls. Since the BCS came into play we've seen actual good non-conference matchups, and we've seen good teams with an early season loss make some noise late in the season. Nobody should care what happened between Nebraska and Iowa in week 3, just like nobody cares where Everton are in the table after 10 match days. A good college football season is the whole, and the playoffs are part of the whole. In the current campaign, a 12 team playoff would likely let the Vols in, who are obviously a good team but more or less eliminated due to their loss to Georgia.
Within 5 years of the 12 team playoff, everyone complaining about it now will either say they always liked it or (maybe) admit they were wrong. [
in the vaults.] And most will be asking for it to expand and add another week as well.
Pittsburgh Footy
Player Valuation: £35m
Yeah, this is the point for me. There's no room for error for the "smaller sides" in the current format.
Pittsburgh Footy
Player Valuation: £35m
But every single weekend doesn't matter to Alabama, LSU, Georgia, or even Ohio State for that matter, as much as it would for a TCU or USC.
While I do agree the SEC is the best conference, top to bottom, year in year out, the difference between the SEC and the next two or three conferences isn't as great as the media/SEC apologists say that it is. And it's in those margins where the SEC wins out on rankings 4, 5, 6, 7 b/c they all play each other, boosting each others' strength of schedule
Pittsburgh Footy
Player Valuation: £35m
Exactly - you can't parse out 1 loss teams that play a completely different schedule to other teams with 1 or 2 losses.
A playoff will determine outcomes on the field, not base an outcome based on someone playing a tough game in the middle of September and losing, then losing on the road in the conference season on the last play of the game
TN Toffee
Player Valuation: £20m
I agree that it doesn’t anymore. Even a four team playoff has long since ruined that. Prior to that though, the games just felt so much more monumental because every single weekend was a de facto elimination game. There were a lot of seasons where one loss was enough to sink your NC hopes.
Or no losses! Do you remember 2004? USC finished as national champs but Oklahoma (12-0), Auburn (12-0), Boise (11-0) and Utah (11-0) did not get any chance to *play* for the title! All 4 were top-10 ranked!* A playoff should have settled that. We aren't talking UCF 2017, because they weren't actually good (although a 12 team playoff would have given them a well earned chance), we are talking 4 undefeated teams (and 2 from power conferences) with 0% chance to be national champion!
Do you think that was better? What about 2003 with "split" national champions LSU and USC? It's an absurd denial of history to think the old system was better.
*I believe before Thanksgiving 2004, 5 of the top 7 ranked teams were undefeated