ESPN: Big Ten Considering a 4-Team Playoff
I hate Colin Cowherd, and I think he looks like a jackass talking to himself in a radio booth. But he makes some GREAT points if you watch the video.
February 8th, 2012 at 10:33 AM ^
I disagree with the whole 'the regular season is meaningless' thing.
The point of the regular season in pro sports is NOT to decide who the best team is, it's to decide who gets to the playoffs and a chance to win the championship of the respective sport. The regular season is a weeding process to get the best teams to match up against each other. They have byes and home field advantage to offset the advantage that a team gets when playing in a crappy division.
The biggest problem with college football is too many teams, nobody is playing the same competition so the polls are all objective.
February 8th, 2012 at 10:51 PM ^
February 8th, 2012 at 10:38 AM ^
I say everybody should just play one game in September and let the CBS commentators decide the best team in college football. That way every game is a championship game, and people can "just tell" which teams are the best anyway, right?
Actually, to hell with head-to-head matchups. Let's all just send the teams to combines all year and determine the MNC game participants by scout rankings*, average shuttle times and bench presses.
*Scouts must be from Florida, Louisiana, Texas and California since they're the only ones who know anything about football.
February 8th, 2012 at 10:42 AM ^
Why is Dave Brandon against this plan!?!? Does anyone have any statements by him?
Found this qoute, but doesn't really explain why he is opposed. No system will ever be totally fair so his point is moot.
Michigan athletic director Dave Brandon, who is open to any option that includes keeping the conference and Pac-12 tied to the Rose Bowl, said he's not sure the plus-one model will please everybody.
"I know a lot of people would love to see one more great football game, but I'm not sure this type of playoff will make it more fair," Brandon said. "At some point, you have to draw the line. With four teams, there will be controversies about who those four teams should be because it's usually not clear."
February 8th, 2012 at 10:52 AM ^
+1 is not equal to a 4 team playoff. +1 means play the bowls, then take the best two teams from the 4 BCS winners and they play for the title. That's what he's against and it's likely because Alabama would beat someone in the Sugar Bowl and no one would put them behind OSU at that point, even though they beat Stanford.
The 4 team playoff proposal is that sometime in December you would have Stanford @ LSU and OSU @ Bama. The winners of those games play in the NCG and the losers don't play in bowls. If he's against that, it's likely because the winner of the Big Ten and Pac12 confrences won't get to play in the Rose Bowl if they are in the playoff, making the Rose Bowl less meaningful.
February 8th, 2012 at 12:01 PM ^
Ahhh, that makes more sense. For some reason I didn't put two and two together. He is against the +1 (understandably) and he doesn't like the idea of marginalizing the Rose Bowl. Maybe the RoseBowl become the potential Big10 vs Pac10 playoff game?
February 8th, 2012 at 4:48 PM ^
Plus one is a four-team playoff, with the distinction that the first round is played in traditional bowl games and then the championship game a week later.
It is definitely set up with semi-finals and a final, rather than just picking two teams after the BCS games have been played. (The article also gives the same definition.)
February 8th, 2012 at 5:39 PM ^
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_football_playoff_debate
Plus one and 4-team playoff are not the same, although, they are apparently being confused as the same because of the plus one proposal from the SEC a few years ago which combined the concepts. A plus one is when they select the teams after the bowls have been played. If they were the same thing, then they wouldn't call it a plus one, they would have referred to it as a 4-team playoff originally, instead of the plus one.
February 8th, 2012 at 6:47 PM ^
The second article you listed gave my definition of "plus-one." I did a Google search of "plus one football" and, except for Wikipedia, all results on the first page refer to a four-team playoff. It's also clear from Brandon's comments that he's referring to a four-team playoff as well when he says "plus one."
Wikipedia is clear that it's the other direction but the closest sources to that explanation don't mention the term at all. You may be right about the origin of the term, but anyone referring to plus-one now is almost certainly referring to a four-team playoff. There's also good reason not to call it a "4-team playoff" if you're in favor of it since that sounds like the playoffs that have been consistently rejected, while "plus-one" sounds like a new idea.
February 8th, 2012 at 7:54 PM ^
"The term “plus one” is both confusing and confused. It came from the idea that you stage all the traditional bowls, run the BCS formula again, then have one more game – a “plus one” – between 1-2."
"Plus one" literally comes from the idea that you are playing the full season, including bowls...plus one... more game to determine the champion. He goes on to point out that calling it a plus one is a misnomer. Plus one isn't a new concept, the idea just became more popular when it was combined with the idea of a 4-team playoff. Everyone is only now referring to the concept of a 4-team playoff as a "plus one" because the original SEC proposal.
I reread the article and you are correct that this is what Brandon was referring to with "plus one", so I retract my first paragraph from above. However, the plus one format has been brought up pretty much every year that I can remember that had some sort of controversy around a split national championship, specifically in 2004 after USC and LSU split the NC and 2008 after Utah beat Alabama.
February 8th, 2012 at 8:46 PM ^
You're absolutely right that the second article defined "traditional" plus-one the way you had described; I had misread the following paragraph and thought it did the opposite.
In addition to the four-team playoff becoming the more common meaning of "plus-one," part of my confusion about the origin of the term is that the other idea of plus-one (which I know you're not advocating) would rarely be a better solution, and might well be a worse solution many years, so I assumed it couldn't possibly be what anyone had advocated. I underestimated the number of silly people in college sports administration.
February 8th, 2012 at 10:33 AM ^
I can't believe that Cowherd had something good to say about Michigan.
February 8th, 2012 at 1:31 PM ^
I can't believe it took half the first page for someone to bring this up!
I fricking hate Cowherd, not because he hates Michigan (I also hate people who hate commentators and analysts because they don't slurp their favorite team), I just think he's an ass that think he knows everything. He talks down on everyone and is a jerk, no matter who you root for.
However he made some VERY good points. I was #shocked.
February 8th, 2012 at 10:37 AM ^
One rule I would really love to see? Regardless of seeding, if two teams from the same conference make the top four, they play each other the first week, not in the championship. We would have had a much better championship this year (and in 2006) if that was the case, IMO.
February 8th, 2012 at 11:01 AM ^
I'd still prefer to see it be conference champs only or conference champs +2 so the ND's of the world would go along with it.
B1G
SEC
ACC
Big 12
Pac 12
Big East?
Higest ranked at-large 1
Second highest ranked At large 2
If at larges are not from other confereces or independant, then they play thier conference champ for the right to advance (so we don't have another conference on conference match up). Its simple and makes sense so there is no way it would be implemented.
February 8th, 2012 at 2:33 PM ^
Agreed.
February 8th, 2012 at 10:51 AM ^
my question is this.
Lets say a team which was ranked high enough to be in the BCS game loses to a team not in the BCS game. And then this team somehow wins the championship.
Who gets to go to the rose bowl? im sure they go to the rose bowl, but what about the higher ranked team?
VT lost the title game but still managed to get into the sugar bowl. but i think 4 team playoff could get a lil trickier.
February 8th, 2012 at 10:57 AM ^
8-team playoff - the five BCS conference champions, 3 at-large teams. Winners of the Big Ten and Pac-10 always play in the first round in the Rose Bowl. Boom.
February 8th, 2012 at 11:03 AM ^
except that it makes the B1G's path to the NC hard because its essentially a home game for the PAC-12.
February 8th, 2012 at 11:28 AM ^
I hate the BCS but I love the regular season, this playoff can't expand much but the teams in the playoff must win their conference. It's only fair, sorry new Bama poster. I say the highest 4 seeds in the BCS that are conference champs, regardless of conference, and fuck Notre Dame. If they want in, join the Big 10.
February 8th, 2012 at 11:34 AM ^
I felt a great disturbance
as 20 million ACC/Big East fans cried out as their NC chances disappeared . . . and then, nothing
February 8th, 2012 at 6:45 PM ^
you're right. You don't win your conference, you didn't have the best season of anybody in the nation and thus should be ineligible to win the MNC. The week after the conference championship games, play the two playoff games. Winners go to the title game, losers go to bowl games. So if M were to win the B1G, they play in the semi-final. If they lose, they go to the Rose Bowl as B1G champs. If they win, they go to the title game. Simple as that.
February 8th, 2012 at 12:07 PM ^
Brian's NC format and let's get on with it. I STILL don't want to play OSU two times in 2-3 weeks.
February 8th, 2012 at 1:44 PM ^
College Football was never better than when all the major bowl games (and some minor) were played on New Year's Day.
I'll take a trip to the Rose Bowl on New Year's Day over an antiseptic corporate National Championship playoff game.
February 8th, 2012 at 4:34 PM ^
not sure if anyone has already posted the link to this article.
February 8th, 2012 at 5:21 PM ^
if they change how the rankings are done. If you have a crap cake sitting in front of you, the flavor of icing is your least concern.
February 8th, 2012 at 7:27 PM ^
Though nobody (myself included) was very excited to see an LSU-Alabama rematch in the MNC game this past season, it's pretty difficult to argue that those were not the two best teams. Obviously there is no way to prove this, but I personally believe that LSU would have annihilated Oklahoma State, had they met.
I say this because I wonder, is the goal to set up a playoff that would be the "fairest," in terms of rewarding the teams that have proven themselves most worthy of being crowned champions,or is the goal to set up a playoff that would produce the most exciting matchups (or at least avoid boring rematches)? It seems like a lot of the arguments in this topic are between people concerned about fairness vs. people concerned about better matchups.
February 9th, 2012 at 12:16 AM ^
But ever since the BCS formed I have always questioned it. There have a been a few years here and there that I was fine with the results "it" produced. By and large, however, I've always yearned for what we had pre-BCS; was it Bowl Alliance yadda yadda?? I'm not going to look it up, but I was perfectly fine with whatever it was. So what if the AP and coaches picked a different champion, are Michigan fans really upset that we shared the title in 1997? I'm not, and I'm fine with Nebraska claiming share to it as well.
For starters, we as fans get too caught up in crowning a mono-Champion; we like college football and it's really not because our team is crown national champion at the end of the season, it's what was done along the way and any Bowl game should be an enjoyment (striving for the Rose of course).
The whole playoff, plus-one, BCS refinement, etc. talk gives me headaches. I simply liked how it used to be! I know I'm in the minority but, IMO it'd be better than talking in circles about the aforementioned day-in and day-out (but I suppose that also gives college football the interest it has because there's aways something to discuss and debate).