Playoff Ideas, Part 3: A Different Approach
OK, so earlier, I presented a playoff idea which was pretty radical. I still think the only major-major problem with it was that it made a giant mess of conference championships, but that's not easily overcome.
Still, I'm gonna keep trying. I still hate the idea of a playoff pretty passionately, because typical playoff ideas like the MWC's yesterday aren't well thought out IMO. The effect they would have on what I like best about college football - the importance of the regular season and the excitement of bowl season - are brushed aside in favor of the narrowminded crusade toward crowning a "true" national champion. I think quite a few people who call themselves in favor of a playoff would change their mind if they actually grasped what the side effects would be, because they have their "perfect" one in mind.
That said, I recognize that the tide is against me here. Sooner or later there will be one, whether simply because the commissioners' thinking evolves or because Congress rams a shitty, poorly-thought-out playoff down our throat in the interest of scoring cheap political points with voters.
So I want to keep trying ideas that I think will continue to preserve both an entertaining regular season and keep the bowl season intact. (If we drop a lesser bowl or two - Papajohn's.com Bowl, say - I'm not distressed.) Keeping in mind two things of course, which I consider absolute truisms of a playoff: It must be big (12 team minimum, 16 more likely), and it must be played primarily at home stadiums.
So. The Big East basketball tournament is set up as follows:
#9 vs. #16
#10 vs. #15
#11 vs. #14
#12 vs. #13
#'s 5-8 get a bye and await opponents from the first round. #'s 1-4 get two byes. Thus a HUGE advantage to teams that performed well in the regular season. This would be multiplied in a college football playoff, as these teams would get weeks off to practice before playing.
So part 1 is accomplished: the regular season remains meaningful.
Part 2 - the bowl season must not be emaciated by losing all the best teams - means the playoff takes place mostly in December, and the early losers are to be snapped up by the bowls. Instead of conference affiliations, certain bowls would contract to get, say, the loser of the 11-14 game or the 6-11/14 game. I envision all losers could go to a bowl except for those losing in the Football Final Four.
This season, the conference championship games are December 5. The playoff could be on successive Saturdays: 12th, 19th, 26th. The Football Final Four would be played January 2 - my proposal being that, like the current BCS CG, the two games would be rotated among current BCS bowls.
The championship game would be January 9, and I envision, though I'm not married to the idea, that the game would be in one city permanently, much like the CWS is always in Omaha.
The BCS standing would be scrapped and the seedings would be chosen by selection committee, just like basketball.
Using the BCS standings from last year as an example only, as well as conference champions seeded the way I think they should be, the playoff last year might have looked like this:
First round:
#16 Troy at #9 Boise State
#15 Ball State at #10 Ohio State
#14 East Carolina at #11 TCU
#13 Virginia Tech at #12 Cincinnati
Second round:
#12 Cincinnati at #5 USC
#11 TCU at #6 Utah
#10 Ohio State at #7 Texas Tech
#9 Boise State at #8 Penn State
Third round:
#8 Penn State at #1 Oklahoma
#7 Texas Tech at #2 Florida
#6 Utah at #3 Texas
#5 USC at #4 Alabama
Football Final Four in Pasadena and New Orleans
#4 Alabama vs. #1 Oklahoma
#3 Texas vs. #2 Florida
Championship in wherever:
#2 Florida vs. #1 Oklahoma
(Full disclosure: Example edited after I remembered most of the point of having 16 teams is to allow for autobids, which I think are absolutely inseparable from a playoff.)
Advantages:
- Playoff! Y'all can stop whining.
- Regular season and bowl season mostly intact.
- Likelihood that teams would actually play fewer games than a standard playoff. The 9-16 teams would need to win five games to win, but that is not guaranteed. Chances are the champion only plays three. In a standard bracket, two teams must play four games.
- More teams get to host a playoff game. It's guaranteed that 12 teams would play host at least once, whereas the max guaranteed in a standard bracket would be eight. Spreading the money around makes everyone happy.
Disadvantages:
- Bowl contracts trickier, but not too hard, and traditional rivalries (Rose Bowl) might be hard to keep around. Bowl scheduling would have to adapt rather heavily especially for the third round losers.
- Compressed season and difficulty with final exams. Jumping straight into the postseason might be considered difficult for the college athlete.
- Still not convinced a team and their fans can viably travel twice, but the Big Event nature of a Final Four could overcome that.
Thoughts? I look forward to hearing them.
The possibility of games near Christmastime at places like M, OSU, or PSU seems pretty wild to me.
Wild in a good way. I would love to have Florida come up to the Big House in December and see how the Gators do in the cold.
I think it would be awesome. However, I meant wild in the sense that SEC/B12 schools would never agree to it.
I think this proposal is implausible for several reasons, but mostly because it involves far too many teams and takes far too long. I find it sort of strange that you state a preference for having an important regular season and no playoff (as many do, making an assumption that these are competing interests), and then turn around and suggest a monstrous over-the-top format.
Your proposal requires too many games, and has them happening too early. Nothing could possibly decimate the current non-BCS bowls more than to schedule a dozen postseason games between mcuh better teams in the days before they take place. No one outside of the fans of the schools involved would stay interested in minor bowls when there is an ongoing championship. You make them like the basketball NIT. It is essential for the bowl season that chronologically the games have increasing importance. (You will notice that the small potatoes post-New Years bowl they now have each year gets lost completely.)
blueloosh:
Admittedly, yes, this is longer by one round than a standard bracket.
However! I think 16 teams is mandatory. It's not that I want 16 teams. It's that I think it must be 16 teams otherwise it won't be accepted by the conferences. Why? Consider that one of the primary we-must-have-a-playoff arguments is that Divison I-A football is the only NCAA sport not to have one, except for the track/swimming type sports. If that's the rationale then you must take into account this fact: the other thing that every one of these tournaments have is autobids for conference champions. That being the case, one at-large spot is far too few - it doesn't solve the Texas/Texas Tech problem. Thus, 16. Frankly, anyone who thinks a playoff can work with eight or six teams is pissing into the wind and wishing on the tooth fairy.
(I will edit my example, because I was in a hurry to type it out and forgot. It was supposed to have conference champions. Thus only five at-large spots, which actually does make the regular season more important than in the current example of top-16 BCS.)
Second, a great many of these minor bowls already are cared about only by the fans of the teams in them. I mean, FAU/CMU? NIU/LT? WMU/Rice? Was the world really watching? In the regular season they go so far as to play games on Tuesday just so ESPN2 will have something to show. If that can work, so can mid-week bowl games (Friday night, Wednesday, whenever) while the playoffs are going on. Besides, losing the weaker bowls and requiring a 7-5 record to qualify would only serve to strengthen interest in the bowl season, IMO.
Granted, there is no playoff in which the bowl season remains 100% intact. But a six or eight team playoff (like many people believe in) that's too short to allow the losers to return to the bowl structure, I think that decimates the bowl season far, far worse than this one would. Here, the Rose and Orange and such can still choose from among the best teams, except the top four which really is not much changed from the top two. Under the ill-thought-out mess that Obama wants, they'd be relegated to second-class citizen status.
I think 16 is a little too much, but nice idea.
I think the top teams need byes and I think you need to play as many home games as possible to avoid too much fan base travel. I think Brians proposal is still the best, the only tweak to his is that instead of no auto conference bids I think their should be a rule that there are no auto bids but the 1st bid from your conference has to the league champ. So if you win the league at 10-2 and there is an 11-1 team in your conference you have to take both or none to keep the conference championships importance.
I like your format, but I'd cut out the first round and make this an eight-team tournament. #3 and 4 get a bye to the second round, and #1 and #2 teams get byes into the semifinals. That would be the best playoff proposal I've seen.
It keeps the regular season important, just like Brian's six-team idea, but it allows in 8 teams, which I think is the minimum to get the major conferences to sign on. And it avoids some of the wackiness of the Australian rules football idea people proposed earlier.
I agree that there would be pressure to give every conference an automatic bid. If the NCAA runs the tournament, I think you'd almost certainly have 11 autobids. If the major conferences run it, it's possible they could resist the pressure, but they'd probably give all the BCS conferences autobids.
How about a straight, single-elimination, 16 team playoff?
Round of sixteen on conference championship day, top seeds get home game, thus making regular season "meaningful."
Now, to keep the bowls happy, the eight winners play in the four major bowls, and the losers play in lesser bowls.
Two semifinal games on Jaunary eighth.
Final game on January fifteenth.
Two teams play a week later than the last two under the current system, but we have a real champion, determined on the field. All of the bowls get their fix, and the Boise States and Utahs of the world get a chance to prove that they don't belong there on the field.
So, really, everybody benefits: except, of course, the Rose Bowl, the "grandaddy of them all," who is getting old and tired as most grandfathers do.
Because they make so much money off of it, the Big Ten and Pac Ten stonewall any attempt to have a playoff system, using the most laughable arguments in the world, such as "it puts too much of a strain on the students."
As if they give a flying fuck.....
Honestly, if I thought simply awarding home field advantage in one round only to the eight higher seeds was enough of a reward for regular season success, I'd have dropped my opposition to a playoff long ago. It's not. It's not nearly enough. Home field is a necessity of the playoffs IMO, not a suitable reward.
Also:
- The bowls don't get their fix, because they don't get their pick. They just get stuck with a matchup of the NCAA's choosing.
- Too much travel. I steadfastly maintain that you cannot expect fans to travel to three neutral sites like that.
- Holding the home-field games on conference championship weekend makes a giant mess of the seeding and prevents the conferences from holding their neutral-site championship games. They would never, ever, ever go for it. Plus, you'd almost certainly end up with a situation where a low-seeded team hosts a "conference championship" game against an even lower-seeded team that's also part of the playoffs, whereas a high-seeded team has to go on the road to visit an even higher-seeded team in a different conference. Think: Penn State hosting OSU while Texas has to go visit Oklahoma. It's just a mess all around.
"Honestly, if I thought simply awarding home field advantage in one round only to the eight higher seeds was enough of a reward for regular season success, I'd have dropped my opposition to a playoff long ago. It's not. It's not nearly enough. Home field is a necessity of the playoffs IMO, not a suitable reward."
I feel that having an opportunity to win a national championship is a suitable reward.
"Also:
- The bowls don't get their fix, because they don't get their pick. They just get stuck with a matchup of the NCAA's choosing."
With the exception of four bowls, it would be business as usual. And those four bowls would get the national quarterfinals and rotate for the semis and NC game. That hardly qualifies as being "stuck."
"- Too much travel. I steadfastly maintain that you cannot expect fans to travel to three neutral sites like that."
You are asking fans of two teams to travel twice, and two teams to travel three times. It would be problematic, but any system is problematic. Personally, I think eight teams in four major bowls would be enough, but that leaves room for Boise State or Utah to sue the NCAA someday, and would lead to ignoring the computers and slotting a team from a non-BCS conference.
"- Holding the home-field games on conference championship weekend makes a giant mess of the seeding and prevents the conferences from holding their neutral-site championship games."
Of course it would; it would make them unneccessary. And some conferences would make even more money by hosting two games instead of only one.
"They would never, ever, ever go for it."
I agree with you 100% here. They are far too married to their own egos and power to agree to allowing a fair tournament.
"Plus, you'd almost certainly end up with a situation where a low-seeded team hosts a "conference championship" game against an even lower-seeded team that's also part of the playoffs, whereas a high-seeded team has to go on the road to visit an even higher-seeded team in a different conference. Think: Penn State hosting OSU while Texas has to go visit Oklahoma. It's just a mess all around."
Actually, if you do a straight seeding of 16 teams, it's not a "mess" at all. It's really quite simple. 1/16, 2/15, etc. If the computer seedings are all that matters, conference seedings are a moot point. Conference tiebreakers often include computer rankings.
At this point, we are trusting the computers to make sense of a senseless system and give us two teams. So, why not have the computers continue to make sense of a slightly less senseless system and give us 16 teams, so that nobody has a reason to bitch.
As for the argument that the first team out of the basketball tournament always bitches and it would be the same in football, it is a lot harder for the last team in to upset the best team at home in football than it is in basketball.
As for any conference being "gypped out of their conference championship," you can pretty much bet on the Big 12 and the SEC hosting at least one game. And if the ACC doesn't get one, then they need to play better the next year.
Back to those bowl games, the bowl sytstem is inherently unfair. Why should a Big Ten team automatically have to play a road game in the Rose Bowl against USC or UCLA? Or why should any other team have to play a road game in the Orange Bowl against Miami, UF, or FSU?
The bowls have been running college football long enough. I have no sympathy for them if they lose the power to do so.
That being said, although I think we really need a playoff of some kind, you can't eliminate or gut the bowl system. Any playoff needs to include the bowls. They just don't need to continue to dictate and have their way anymore.
And discussion like this is good. It just needs to happen at the highest levels instead of on fan blogs.
Tater - it's really a nonstarter to wish for something that the conferences won't go for, because it's the conferences that have to agree to this in the first place. And they will never go for the elimination of their precious conference championship games, no matter what the advantages for the bowls and fans are. Any system has to take these games into account - period.
This is partly why I'm so strongly anti-playoff - because people keep wanting to inject unrealistic scenarios in the discussion. I'm willing to bend on the notion (as evidenced by me continuing to propose stuff) but I think many proponents of a playoff start with the idealistic and go from there, rather than starting from the realistic and trying to work with what works. And the fact is, conferences will never, ever give up their conference championship game. The ACC might be a weaker conference on the field than the Big 12 and SEC, but at the boardroom table, they hold equal sway. You can't dismiss their concerns based on performance on the football field, because they don't dole out votes in the boardroom based on that.
Playoffs do not need to include the bowls because turning around and telling independent nonprofits how they will do business (for that is what the bowls are) is just as big a nonstarter. Including the bowls is really code for controlling them. I doubt the Orange Bowl, for example, will like being told it has to take Boise State and Utah, because they're not going to fill the stadium that way, especially when the bowl that's just down the road in Orlando gets to take a Florida team and another southern team of their choices (because they're not involved with the playoff) and fill up the joint no problem. The way I've proposed it leaves the bowls free to operate much the same way they've been operating, only their contracts would likely be slightly more convoluted.
I'm not trying to be nasty or confrontational, I'm just trying to inject realism into the debate. Too many people want things that are just not possible out of this whole playoff thing, and what is the sense of replacing a messy, convoluted system by forcing something unworkable in as a replacement? I strongly suspect that whenever a playoff is instituted, it will differ very strongly from people's visions of it and it won't be as popular as expected.
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