College Football Needs Playoff to Determine Champion!!!

Our view on college football: How to choose a champion:

Give the BCS system the boot. It’s time for an 8-team playoff.
As anyone who follows college football knows, this year has been an unusual challenge for the commentators and computer programmers whose job it is to divine which teams are best. Thanks to a steady dose of upsets, the top of the rankings has been in constant flux for several weeks. As the end of the season approaches, six teams, maybe more, can make a plausible argument to be the best or second best.

This poses a problem because only two will be invited to play in the college football title game on Jan. 7. It's a problem that's well known to football fans. Despite constant complaints, big-time college football remains the only major sport that lacks a playoff system to pick a champion.

Instead, it picks two contenders for the title using a hybrid of computer rankings and human polls (one of which is the USA TODAY coaches' poll). The remaining teams measure their worth through the money and prestige of the bowl games to which they are invited. Four major ones — the Rose, Orange, Sugar and Fiesta bowls — pay $17 million per team. The rest, including such lesser moments in sports as the PapaJohns.com Bowl or the Meineke Car Care Bowl, pay as little as $300,000. But if this problem is well known to sports fans, it is not entirely about sports. It is a minor manifestation of the difficulty American society has in effecting reforms in the broad interest because a relative few special interests can thwart them.

College football lacks a playoff for the simple reason that entrenched interests — principally the major bowl organizations that host their games each January and get the title game every four years, the six major conferences that are allied with them, and the four communities that host the major games — don't want a playoff. The status quo is a money machine for them, and they see no reason to change it, regardless of public interest.

One sees this phenomenon often in the political arena where, say, tax reform or a new highway can be thwarted by a minority of interests. But sports other than college football manage to realize that having a credible champion must trump parochial interests.

College football's system gives everyone something quarrel with. The fan is left unsatisfied at season's end, convinced in many cases his or her team was robbed.

Non-fans, who have never accepted the idea that academic institutions should channel resources into major sports, have even more cause to be angry when they see all the bowl hype.

A playoff, consisting of eight teams, would still stir controversy. Inevitably, the teams finishing ninth or 10th would complain. Nonetheless, it would be fairer. And the controversy would be of lower order.

True, it would take a few players out of the classroom for longer periods. But this could be more than made up by eliminating some of the many games that colleges have been adding — particularly the 12th game that was added for all teams last year.

A playoff system would be good for college football. The people who run the sport are the only ones who seem not to realize that.

Posted at 12:21 AM/ET, November 23, 2007 in College sports - Editorial, Entertainment - Editorial, Football -

http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2007/11/our-view-on-col.html

 

Considering that the Buckeyes will most always be included, I am in!!



This year, a playoff could get the Bucks into the big game. Last year, maybe not.

 

University of Hawaii is the only undefeated team in the country. If they beat UW next week, they deserve a good BCS bowl game, as Boise State did last year.

Go Warriors!!