The BCS-Playoffs Debate: Determining A College Football Champion

However, Stoops puked away five straight BCS bowls (and only broke the streak by being gifted an unranked 4-loss opponents, go to hell Big East) so he has some self-defecation yet to do before he takes the title off Chokelahoma.

That said, maybe they should have paid a little more attention to how they got pantsed in Strawberry Canyon instead of saying “LA LA LA CAN’T HEAR YOU FAKE INJURY FAKE FAKE” and maybe they wouldn’t have gotten molested by the most incompetent SEC defense in a title game that I can remember. AUBURN HAS NO PASS DEFENSE WHY DO YOU RUN YOUR OUTSIDE OPTION STRAIGHT INTO THEIR FRONT.

I’m with you. The traditional bowl system was better than the BCS and any potential playoff system. Only a double- or triple-elimination round-robin tournament can really decide a “true” national champion. With over 100 teams in the FBS, it’s silly to say any one team that only plays 13 or 14 games is the national champion. The sample size of wins was too small. If they had to beat 30 teams, then maybe it would be meaningful. But football doesn’t lend itself to such a long schedule.

It’s kinda sad and pathetic that so many of us need to have a national champion at all. It should be enough to play a meaningful conference schedule and go to a traditional bowl. Who cares if Auburn or Texas or someone else goes undefeated, wins their bowl game and claims to be the best in the nation? Whatever makes them feel good. We can just take care of our business, win the Pac-12, then beat up on some poor, hapless team from the Midwest in the Rose Bowl. That should be enough. Rose Bowl champs!!!

It’s just college. The “student”-athletes should be thinking about finals and papers and their Christmas break travel plans. A football playoff is just another sad step in the direction of professionalization of college sports.

I think this is basically right, but I would increase it to an 8 team field because we have seen with TCU, Utah, and Boise that sometimes teams outside of those 4 conferences deserve a shot (sometimes it is even the ACC or, gasp, Notre Dame.)

In effect, I would go back to a 12 game regular season and then have bowl games, starting in early December. Schools still have the fun of bowls, but the conference champions are slotted something like this:

Rose: Pac12 – Big 10
Sugar: SEC – ACC (Miami and Fl State have to get better someday)
Cotton: Big12 – Big East (someday it will be relevant)
Fiesta: The next two highest ranked teams.

Then these teams have a play-off, with the maximum of three post-season games for any school.

Drawing the line is always tough. As mentioned above, I don’t think many schools outside of the top 7 or 8 have a legitimate claim on being national champion, and that is what the tournament is about: not ‘who are the top 8 teams in the country" but “who is the champion.” If you can’t win your conference, you have little to complain about. If you are outside of a favored conference, you need to schedule tough games to prove you belong (an undefeated team that wins a couple of high profile away games in a favored conference will likely be ranked in the top 5).

If you are worried about filling stadiums for the tournament, let the higher ranked team play at home. (Champions can win on the road.)

Pro:
+ keep traditions of bowl games
+ reward conference champions, making regular season mean something
+ limited extra games, but still some big dollar events for the evil all devouring sports industrial complex

Cons:
- somebody will be left out
- the seedings and selection for the tournament, since based on conference, may not be fair
- 12 game instead of 13 game schedule may reduce revenues and mean one less out-of-conference game

Exactly how I would do it. Minimal changes, keep the other bowls around so people can make their money and teams outside the top 4 can still have a fun post-season game, big bowl games are still played and it opens up the field a little from 2 to 4 teams for national champs.

Arguably, there is no PERFECT system to determine a title, in any sport.

But the BCS is perfectly imperfect, which means we need to move toward the more logical solution of determining a champion.

I think the objective is to ensure that the schools with a legitimate claim to the title get in the tourney, which is usually no more than 3 or 4. Yes, it would be a bummer for a 7th or 8th ranked team to not make the tourney, but the complaint would be “we should have been in the tourney”, not “our record demonstrates we are one of the top teams and should be playing for the title”

That said, it does seem that most years a plus one would answer the national championship question. But what happens when there are four undefeated teams going into bowl season?

“Ohio State and Miami didn’t get in because of the MAC and Sun Belt champions, wah! They don’t DESERVE to be in the playoffs!”

Worked for the Seahawks.

The answer to teams that didn’t get an at-large bid is simple: “You should have won your conference.”

And given the ridiculous gap of time between the season’s end and most of the bowls (i.e., the month of December), the schedule could easily be configured to have the conference championship games on Thanksgiving weekend, and the first three rounds of the playoffs completed before Christmas. Then you could STILL have your exhibition bowl games, as only the two championship-game finalists would be still alive in the tournament.

We get our tournament, as well as our bowls, AND we get a much better championship game because the two finalists won’t be coming off a freakin’ 5-week layoff since they last played a game. It’s the ridiculous layoff, more than anything, that I hate about the current system.