With college football bowl season on the horizon, it’s that time again to ask the age-old question.
Does college football need a playoff?
To me, the answer to that question is a resounding yes. As one of the few Americans outside of the SEC who watches more football on Saturdays than on Sundays, it’s difficult to see the sport that I love decided every year by polls and computers and who knows what else.
I’ve always been a big proponent of deciding it on the field (or court), and that’s why I typically call off of work each year to watch the first round of March Madness. Plus, everybody loves a bracket, and the amount of gambling (the legal kind, of course) on a college football playoff would make March Madness seem like child’s play in comparison.
Here’s how it would work.
The NCAA Division I has 11 conferences: ACC, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Conference USA, MAC, Mountain West, Pac-12, SEC, Sun Belt, and WAC. Each division champion would receive an invitation into my playoff. That way, even the little guys can’t complain that they don’t get a fair shake at winning a national title. After those initial 11 teams are locked in, five teams are chosen at-large – this is where the polls would still come in handy. We can either have a selection committee a la March Madness, or it could just be the top five teams in the polls that didn’t win their conferences that receive the bids.
The 16 teams in the playoff would be seeded, and the top seeds would hold first round playoff games on the first weekend of December. The following weekend, the remaining eight teams play, and the top seeds host once again. The semifinals would be the following weekend, and these could be hosted at two of the current BCS bowl sites. Then we take a week off for Christmas, and the championship game is played at a neutral site during the first week of January.
Seems simple enough, right?
Of course there are some hurdles that we have to deal with.
First up would be the independents. Basically, the NCAA could tell them that they either have to join a conference for a shot at one of the automatic bids, or they can rely on trying to get one of the at-large bids each year. Army and Navy would probably join the Big East, BYU the Pac-12, and Notre Dame could do whatever they darn well please (knowing them, they’d probably still refuse to join a conference and think they could get one of the at-large spots and continue to toil in anonymity for years to come).
Next up, we’d have to discuss what would happen with the “other” (crappy) bowls. What the heck, let’s still have those. The NIT still survives, right? Corporate America would still get the chance to slather their logos on the Potato Bowl and the Toilet Bowl, and the rest of us would have something to do on a Tuesday night in December aside from dealing with that annoying family that is in town.
Of course there’s the money that we must discuss. Are you really telling me that networks wouldn’t pay billions for a playoff that could possibly trump late-season NFL, especially when there are very few races left going down the stretch? OK, I know that since you’ve read this far you’re probably a fairly smart person, and since we’re in agreement that the money would be there, let’s move on.
But what about all that studying that the football players will miss out on during the playoff? You’re kidding, right? How do the kids who play in March Madness study? Also, don’t forget that most of these players would be on break throughout most of the playoff.
So, there you have it, folks. Just for fun, here’s how my playoff this year might have looked: