OT: Great Super Bowl follows fairly meaningless regular season.

I love the Giants.  Wish they would quit stressing me out though.  Yes the Giants were 9-7, but they were also really beat up during the regular season.  They got healthy at just the right time and started playing really good football.  Say what you will about a playoff system.  Only Div I football doesn't have it.  Why is that?

Say what you will, the New York Giants are the Super Bowl Champions!

This season will be hard to beat; Gamecocks beatup Nebraska in their bowl game, Michigan wins the SugarBowl, and the Giants win the Super Bowl.  Great year, I love this game!

People love playoffs because they are exciting to watch, especially the 1 loss and done style of March Madness and Pro football.  But they really aren't the best way to crown a champion (March Madness is actually pretty bad at it because of the amount of games and luck needed to pull off that kind of streak, rather than actual best team).

I like the college system better than the pro system.  I wish there was a 4-6 team playoff in college because I think that keeps the significance of the regular season for the most part in check (though even that loses some of it to an extent).  There's always going to be trade offs, the worry is that the $ makes the whole thing get out of hand, then the playoff grows, and then teams with 2, 3, or even 4 losses in college football are getting a shot at the MNC, which shouldn't be the case.

In college football under proposed playoff systems, losing 2-3-4 games will drop you out of the top 4 or 8 by a wide margin.  Someone looked at how many teams should be included in the playoff and they suggested 16.  16 is where the the bottom really starts to fall off and its where you go from Elite/Good to mediocre and lower.

College ball can have its cake and eat it too because the way it is set up, when you lose you drop in the polls.  If MSU and UM lose to ND, they don't drop in the BIG standings, but do drop in national polls which directly affects the BCS pecking order.

The team that played in the Super Bowl tonight was much better than a 9-7 team. They were banged up, missing a bunch of studs (i.e. Bradshaw, Jacobs, and some D linemen) when most of those losses occurred. The team on the field today may very well have been the best in the NFL,as evidenced by their close game with the Packers and beating the Pats at the end of the season.

I'm not saying you don't have a point, but this year may have been a good argument for a playoff because a team wasn't penalized for injuries at the beginning of the year.

I definitely think the NFL shows us that any football playoff in college needs to be limited. I don't think anybody wants a playoff just so a 2-loss team can potentially show up for a few games and suddenly erase their regular season deficiencies; we want a playoff so that nobody gets screwed by the fact only two teams get in and a bunch of computers and pollsters get to decide who the lucky teams are.

Personally, I favor doing another split in D1 for football and doing an 8-team playoff (NFL is 12, but the NCAA has way more teams so 8 is actually a lot less than it looks, comparatively) using the champions of whatever conferences exist at the top level at that point plus 1-3 at-larges depending on the conference count to account for independents (if there are any left) and situtations of disputed conference titles (for example, if a conference produced two teams with the same record that didn't happen to play each other and lacked a conference title game, like was theoretically possible before Nebraska joined the Big Ten).

Of course, that system could and would have its controversies witht he at-larges, but losing an argument for being 8th best and a remote shot at a title draws a lot less sympathy for doing undefeated and being shut out of any shot at all. Plus, it would be versatile enough to handle future developments, such as the scenarios mentioned or the possibility of a band of second-teir teams forming a conference and moving up, kind of like what the Mountain West almost did.

Get rid of the Wild Cards then. Division winners only.

College post season is a farce.  As long as it's determined by voting, it's not a real competition.  Every real competiton must have objective ways of determining its champions.  I'm a fan of Wetzel's plan... all conference champions are qualifiers for the playoffs.  Conference championships are determined objectively.  Teams won't be afraid to schedule great non-conference matchups, and conference play becomes that much more important.  Every team can play its way to a national title without worry about strange computer formulas and human voting systems.

I would like to see playoffs have division champions only, but the NFL makes a lot of money doing it their way.  Sadly, the NFL has rendered the regular season so unimportant that they are often used (illogically, I might add) as an argument against NCAA playoffs.  

As for the game, it was great that a Michigan alum played a big part in the victory.  It amazed me, though, that the Giants have continued to be one of the luckiest teams in football.  They put the ball on the ground four times IIRC, and the only time they lost it, someone on one of the least-penalized teams in football was stupid enough to be the twelfth man on the field.  I wondered why, just once, the football gods didn't turn the ball over and make them pay.

Also, if someone would have told me before the game that Brady, Welker, and Branch would all make crucial mistakes and help cost their team the game, I would have suggested rehab for their crack problem.  

Really, though, the bottom line is that the football gods made the Patriots pay for most of their mistakes, but didn't make the Giants pay for most of theirs.  

That's football.

What is with all the negging? Many of these pro playoff posts are perfectly reasonable points. If you happen to disagree then why not say disagree and explain why and what you believe.

I realize the points mean squat now a days. People that neg other people simply because they disagree should lighten up.

Winning a crappy division is far easier than getting a wildcard berth. And it is not uncommon that a division has only mediocre to crappy teams because it is not particularly improbable that 4 randomly selected teams out of 16 will all be weak to mediocre teams. Hence how you get situations like the 7-9 Seahawks going to the playoffs.

As a Packers fan, whatever.  If Green Bay hadn't turned in such a legendarily pathetic performance at home in the playoffs, their 15-win season might have actually meant something. 

As far as playoffs go, I think the NHL has the best playoff system in all of sports, but we obviously can't have anything like that in the NFL.

About 95% of the entire month of September disagrees with you in the validity of how every single game is important in college football.  I think having a playoff system would encourage more games like LSU vs Oregon or Michigan vs Alabama to start the year.....unless you prefer playing directional schools.

in the playoffs. Just to put their 13-3 record in perspective.

I don't know if this is relevant or not. But as a Giants fan, I find the OP a little annoying - the Giants got into that 7-7 predicament by having to play a murderer's row of opponents.

The Giants also failed to make the playoffs at 10-6 last year.

It seems like what you have problems with is that there are divisions, which would extend your issue here to all professional sports. The Giants fought their way out of the mess that was the NFC East, which earned them a home playoff game and the chance to become the hottest team in the NFL, and, ultimately, the best team.

Mostly, though, this is me putting up my umbrella - you ain't gonna rain on my parade!

I keep reading all these BS excuses about how the Giants were banged up to start the season and that makes it all ok.  Umm, well, alright but if you want to talk about the injury bug let's talk about Gronk.  The guy had the best season of any TE in the history of the NFL and was severely limited in this game.  If you're going to claim that 9-7 isn't a fair representation of the Giants then I'd argue that the game last night wasn't a fair representation of the Patriots.

I'd rather do away with all interleague play if it means we don't have to deal with yet another freaking re-match from the regular season.

else think the Super Bowl sucks?  I find the NFL barely watchable at its best, Wildcard weekend probably.  It is all downhill from there going both ways.  The regular season is filled with more injury reports than good football games, as the importance of a team winning is always less than the importance of the health of important players on fantasy teams.  On the other hand, the Super Bowl is a corporate casarole centered upon owners, organizations instead of teams, and a predetermined MVP trophy handed to the quarterback of the winning team after a spectacularly average performance.  I jumped ship on the NFL a long time ago.  It has not been a good product for many years.

my team didn't win, so I don't care about the season, RABBLE, if I had my way, the Super Bowl teams would have to go undefeated and unscored upon in order to make it to the game, RABBLE, if I were king of the world, RABBLE, RABBLE, RABBLE

This is why they play the game every Sunday, and don't just hand over the win to the team with the better record... comprende?

Giants had an injury-ridden season, a crappy run game but a dominating d-line with an opportunistic passing game... put that together with a season-ending/playoff win streak, and you've got a Super Bowl champion... and I will be going to the NYC parade tomorrow.

To determine a fair champion is impossible in football due to limits in games able to be played, but to best eliminate injustices the fairest thing to do is allow the best teams as determined by the regular season play each other at the end. 

To explain this point I give you a couple of examples.

Schedules can never be even.    The Giants played a brutal schedule and still won their division.   What teams you play, where you play them  and when you play them makes a huge difference.   To look just at a teams record is near impossible to tell if they are the better team.   In the NFL you have a limited amount of teams and play more games than college.

In college it is even worse because you have so many teams.  You can't even compare sometimes.

I never liked the one-and-done nature of the NFL playoffs because it did largely nullify the results of the regular season - in the past couple of years there have a large number of 5 and 6-seeds make the SB and/or win it, and usually they struggle the next season as their hot streak ends and they revert to the usual slightly-above .500 team they were for most of the year.  I mean, after the Giants won their last SB, they went 12-4 and then missed the playoffs for 2 straight years, and barely made it in this year.  And even during that 12-4 season, they lost 4 of their last 5 games (including the divisional-round game against the Eagles), so it definitely felt like a team regressing to the mean.

At the same time, I won't discredit what the Giants did - they beat two #1 seeds and the #2 NFC seed on their way to the title, so it wasn't a couple of lucky breaks that got them to the end.  But looking at the whole season, both the Packers and Niners were better "teams" over the first 16 games, and arguably so were the Patriots.  Heck, the Niners beat the Giants 27-20 and the Packers 38-35 the first time they met all year, yet we reward the Giants for their playoff wins.   

I think crowning a champion with a bowl game, without something approximately a playoff or at least a meaningful collection of good teams battling for those coveted spots, makes the eventual title somewhat meaningless.  I know people love to point to that Auburn team a couple of years ago that didn't get a chance to play for the title, but Texas and USC were also undefeated and a playoff may have helped to clear up that picture a bit.  With a 4-team playoff, you give those teams with great seasons a chance without allowing a team like, I don't know, OSU going 9-3 but getting hot for 3 weeks and winning a title they have no business winning.

FWIW, I felt the exact same way. I really didn't care who won the in terms of specific teams, but the fact that a team that a 9-7 team can win the game that is supposed to declare the best team for the season really pisses me off. Hell, as we saw last season, even a 7-9 team has a shot. Can you imagine if a 7-5 team won the National Championship? That's why I don't like auto-bids.

Something that I just realized, which is pretty interested, is that in both conferences, there were 6 teams above .500, 4 at .500, and 6 below .500. What that says to me is that allowing 12 teams is essentially aimed at getting all of the teams above .500 into the playoffs. Why? Why not just take the top 6 teams, who would all happen to have 12+ wins, and let them play? They are all deserving. Any team with 6 fewer wins than the team with the most wins is not deserving.

In the NFL, the Super Bowl Champion is merely the winner of the tournament that is constructed at the end of the season. It does not claim, and obviously does not, decide the best team over the course of a season. Every sport with a playoff is similar in this way.

The best way to decide the best team is a balanced schedule like the European soccer leagues use. Of course, they sacrifice the pageantry of a one-game, winner-take-all event to crown the champion--no "title game." They also have the Champions League, which is separately exciting due to the tournament nature--the BCS of soccer, kind of.

College football is the only sport that does try to decide the best team, not the one that won some games that are more important than others. Right now it's done subjectively, but a small playoff could help eliminate some biases and issues with having so many teams and so few data points to distinguish between different teams with similar records.