4 Team Playoff Officially Approved

The "N + 1" team or "N + 2" team will always bitch, but as we have seen in prior threads, four teams generally includes most teams in the NC conversation.  I really don't care about teams from second level conferences.  Run the B1G or SEC or Big 12 gauntlet and then get back about your 11-1 season.

Works for me.  I would prefer eight, but I could live with six.

To see the dilemma you have with only four, you have to look way, way back to  . . . gee, you only have to look back to last year.  

Alabama, LSU, OK ST would probably be consensus picks, but who is the 4th team?  B1G Champion Wisconsin?  Pac 12 Champion Oregon?  #4 ranked Stanford?  You are leaving out some teams with real merit.  This is not just leaving out the "65th team" in the NCAA Basketball tournament.

Six or Eight ensures that all the major conference champions are typically represented, as well as a couple of at-larges with merit.

Oh well. Four it is for now.  Better then Alabama-LSU.

The rational opposition to such a system comes from college presidents and faculty who fear a substantial disruption to their campuses in the period around finals. A 16 team playoff would almost mandate on-campus games in early to mid December, the moment in the fall semester that presidents and faculty believe should remain relatively free of distractions on their campuses. They are substantially opposed to the flood of media, television infrastructure, and fans that an on campus playoff at the D1 level would bring as disruptive to the central academic missions of the university.

At the lower levels, this is much less of a concern because the attention from media and fans is not even comparable. Those playoffs aren't substantially disruptive because far fewer people care. 

But there may be something to be said for the argument that players at this level are faster/harder-hitting and that perhaps it's more physically difficult to get through a season if it's that long.  Given what we're learning about the long-term consequences of this sport, I think we have to be cautious about how much we can ask players to play.

I get what you're saying, but now that the conferences are getting bigger, that wouldn't be that fair because the schedules are so different, and you could miss the other best team in your conference and still win.  Plus, it's an extra game for every conference and it's fun. 

If you got rid of conference title games (which would be 12 games or however many conference there are) just for an extra round of the playoffs, you'd take away a big game for a lot of schools just so the top schools could play an extra one.

that a team in contention will play three postseason games, I'd rather play a Big Ten team for the first round. Even if we're talking about replacing a very good team (say, number four Missouri) with a good team (number eleven Wisconsin), I'd rather keep things interesting within the conference, and play one of the other nine teams we've played forever, plus our shiny new additions.

Your plan makes sense, but it's a wholesale change, and requires far more regulation (telling conference how many teams they can have) than would be possible, especially with the history some conferences have.  I'm thinking more of a feasible system based on what we already know won't change (or can reasonably predict won't change).

EDIT:  Also, very rarely does an undefeated Alabama play a 3-loss South Carolina in champpionship games.  LSU played 2-loss UGA this year, 1-loss Wisconsin played 2-loss MSU (1-loss in conference), and had USC not been on bowl ban, you would have had 2-loss Oregon (1-loss in conference) play 1-loss USC.  That's all pretty typical, and they all have pretty big implications. 

Who should leave the SEC, Big Ten and Pac 12? More importantly, what are the presidents of Big Ten schools going to say when you say, "alright, we need to throw out two schools your school has been associated with for a century and have $500m in lost CIC money this fiscal year because of it"? I doubt you could convince MSC that Michigan would be better off without Northwestern and Purdue (or insert other non-elite football school here) in the Big Ten and the CIC.

I'm not talking about the teams who lose in the first round.  But keep in mind that almost all of the 8 teams would be teams who played in a conference champ game (especially the ones who are likely to win).  That means that before your 8 team tourney starts, most of the teams have played 13 games.  The two teams that play in the final will have played 16 games.  That's too many. 

Saying the the players would be happy to play another game to win a title is irrelevent.  They'd play 20 if if meant they got a title.  It doesn't mean it's the best thing for them on a yearly basis. 

I haven't seen that either, but I had previously heard that there would only be one more year of the BCS, so it had me confused a bit.