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Here's Why a Playoff is Bad for College
Football
Okay, LSU fans would party anyway, but they celebrated BIG TIME in '07.
Commentary by PubClub Columnist "The Bartender"
College football does not need a playoff.
What it needs is for everyone to quit talking about college football
needing a playoff.
By late October, every game on ESPN has commentators and even play-by-play
announcers starting the chatter – begging for it to happen
– followed by national magazines and local newspapers spiting out
similar stories as if it's a national crisis. It then continues with
more talk from sports anchors (primarily, but not exclusively, from
ESPN).
Setting aside, for the moment, the fact that the role of journalists
is to report the news and not create it, they say a true champion is
not crowned and therefore the season is incomplete. What we sports fans
need, they argue, is an NFL-style playoff involving various numbers
of teams (four, eight or even 16). Even Brack Obama said he wanted to see a playoff.
 But an
NFL-style playoff!? Please, for the love of the game, NO!!! This
would create an NFL-style regular season where players and teams fail
to show up each week knowing they can lose to, say the Lions or 49ers,
and still make the playoffs.
The NFL playoff system rewards mediocrity.
The college system rewards excellence and performance.
Division I-A college football has the best regular season of any sport
because teams simply can't lose more than once (in most years
anyway) and win the championship. Go down early and it's an emotional
fight to get back to the top. How heart-pounding exciting would that Texas Tech-Texas game have been if each school knew they would be in a playoff anyway? Would the Red Raiders have even attempted to go for the game-winning touchdown? Maybe that play would not have happened if a playoff were in place.
Lose late or for a second time (in most
years) and it's a crushing end to the season, something that can only
be slightly salvaged by – get this – a victory in a bowl game.
Even ESPN's promotions state that "every game counts." They
do, but they won't under a playoff. USC should NOT play for a national
championship when it loses to 4-8 Stanford, as it did in 2007. Or Georgia the same year for being blown out by Tennessee. Or USC again for falling to average Oregon State (one that was smacked by a Big 10 team, Penn State).
College football is emotional. Passionate. Losing a game is such a
traumatic experience fans remember it for decades. Think SC fans won't
look back at the loss to Stanford (and to Oregon State this year and UCLA the previous season)
for years to come? Put in a playoff and those losses don't matter.
As proof of the importance of the regular season, just look back to
a mid-October Saturday in 2005. It was one of the best days in college
football regular-season history.
Over course of the day, Alabama kicked a last-play field goal against
Ole Miss to remain undefeated, #1 USC beat Notre Dame on a pair of last-drive
dramatic plays, Michigan scored with one second left to defeat #8 Penn
State and #4 Florida State was upset by Virginia. All these games had
national implications and resulted in incredible emotions from fans
on both sides – feelings that still persist to this day.
 That's
because the games mattered! It was like March Madness. That day
WAS a playoff.
In the most bizarre year of them all, 2007, all the upsets set up a
spectacular must-see final weekend. (By contrast, how many "meaningless"
games were played on the last week of the NFL's regular season?)
Instead of celebrating this exciting turn of events, all the analysts
and columnists could do was scream about the system. A playoff WILL
dilute the regular season and render once-important matchups and even
some rivalry games meaningless.
Sports Illustrated, once a magazine that featured novelists
acting as sports writers, should be assessed a piling on penalty for
a post regular season article in 2007. Austin Murphy – you would think
a guy named Austin would be more astute about college football – made
a wisecrack about the anti-playoff argument of preserving the integrity
of the bowls, writing, "heaven forbid any harm befall, for instance,
the Poinsettia, New Mexico or Motor City bowls!"
HeyAustin, this is not about preserving the likes of the Poinsettia,
New Mexico or Motor City bowls, but established ones like the Rose,
Sugar, Orange, Fiesta, Cotton and even the Citrus (now the Capitol One)
and Gator bowls.
In college football, tradition is an important part of the game. Sure the Texas-Oklahoma debate has gone unsettled this year but that's the Big 12's problem. The conference championship should feature these two teams instead of a miserable Missouri. And you know what – that would be, in essence, a playoff game.
SI's 2007 playoff proposal, by the way, had Oklahoma in the championship
game, Virginia Tech knocking of Missouri in the first round and included
Hawaii. None of those teams deserved to be in any championship
discussion, a point they proved in their respective bowl games. Yet,
a playoff would have included them all.
 Say
there IS a playoff. What happens in years when there are clearly two
top teams and they meet, as they did in 2005 when Texas beat USC in
the Rose Bowl? Would you then ask the Longhorns to play ANOTHER game?
And against an inferior opponent to the one they just beat?
Penn State was #3 that year. The eventual #4 happened
to be – gasp! – Ohio State. Would anyone would have wanted
to see that end the season? It would have been a rematch anyway,
because the teams had already played back in September. So there!
The solution is not to let in undeserving teams – Oklahoma in
'04 in the Sugar. Nebraska in '02 in the Rose. Virginia Tech until it
can learn to win a bowl game or two. Ohio State in any year not involving
Miami. (In fact, Big 10 schools should not even be allowed to play in
a championship game; there's simply not the week-in/week-out competition
to make a team worthy.)
What about Auburn, undefeated in 2004 and shut out? Please. SC plastered
the Tigers on the Plains the previous season and while Auburn did go
13-0 in ''04 it took a fluke play to beat LSU 10-9, it was a rare off
year for the SEC and no one who saw Auburn struggle to barely beat Virginia
Tech in the Sugar Bowl could rightly argue it was a championship-caliber
team.
The current system can work fine as long as it utilizes people (and
only people) who actually know something about college football to determine
the championship contenders.
If college football were ever to go to a playoff, by the way, there's
only one way to make it fair.
Get rid of the superconferences and conference championship games,
which only serve to put teams at the risk of losing. Do like the Pac-10
instead and have every team in 10-school conferences play each other.
The two top-ranked teams to emerge from the four major bowls would
then play in a final game rotated among the bowl sites like now. Why
not the four winning teams? Because in most years – and this
goes back decades – there are only two championship-caliber teams
after the bowls.
Any more and it really really dilutes the regular season.
The Bartender spent many fall Saturdays of his youth selling sodas
in Neyland Stadium and attended the University of Alabama, so he's been
around college football his entire life. He can be reached at bartender@pubclub.com
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