It’s that
time of year again. Around New Years Day, we here in the US get College
Football crazy. I was excited because my University of Minnesota Golden Gophers
finally made it to a bowl game that was on New Years Day for the first time
since 1962. That was when my Dad was a sophomore in high school, and 21 years
before I would be born. Never mind that the Gophers lost, they still did
something that had not been done in 50 years. Yet, there is something that I
have never understood about how the NCAA determines the National Champion:
Voting.
The
national champion was determined by the votes of sports writers and coaches. Before
the 1999 season, the national champion was crowned by voting only after all
bowl games were played, from 1999 to 2014 the “top two” teams played in the BCS
title game for the championship. Both of these options made no sense to me what
so ever. If you want to figure out who the best team is, you have a tournament.
You know, where there are multiple teams to start out with, they get ranked and
seeded, and then put into a bracket, and they play multiple games to determine
a winner. You don’t use a Ouija board and a logic puzzle grid to determine the
champion! Well, we as fans finally got what we have wanted for so long…kinda.
For the
FBS, which means Football Bowl Subdivision (which is the stupid name the NCAA
came up with for division the big schools play in, because there are two groups
of big schools in college football and we should know them by the dumbest
abbreviations possible), we now get a playoff with four teams. YES! Wait…hang
on. Not yes. No. NO! That’s not right! A tournament is more than four teams! A
tournament is around 32 teams, or 24 teams if you give first round byes to the
top eight teams. We were so close!
Every other
division of college football has a tournament. Except for the big schools,
where money matters more than championships. At the Division III level, 32 teams
make the cut. At the Division II level, 24 teams. At the FCS, or Division I-AA
(the smaller big schools division), 24 teams get a shot at the championship. Even
in the NFL we get 12 teams in the playoffs to see who can win the Super Bowl.
Why the hell is it still taking the NCAA so long to make this tournament happen
at the FBS level! (That’s a rhetorical question; I know the answer is money)
This year
is the first year that any type of playoff will be used to determine the
national champion. Even with only four teams in the “playoffs”, it has already
shown us that more than four teams need to be involved. If we did not have the
playoffs, the two teams that would have played for the national championship
would have been #1 Alabama and #2 Florida State. Both Alabama and Florida State
lost their games on New Years Day! The voted on #1 and #2 teams lost, and it
was awesome! Florida State was blown out by Oregon 59 – 21, and Alabama lost to
Ohio State 42 – 35. Because of the inclusion of the top four teams, we got
semi-finals that resulted in the real top teams (I use “top teams” very lightly
here seeing as how there were some major teams left out that should have been given
a chance to go for the title, TCU, Baylor, Michigan State for example) now
playing for a national title, and the two teams, Oregon and Ohio State, would
never have been involved before. This is why the playoffs need to be expanded!
We want to see who the best team is, and sometimes…actually, all the time...the
best team is not determined by some group of voters, but by ACTUALLY PLAYING
THE GAMES ON THE FIELD!
This is
part of sports! You may be considered to be the number one team in the country
by a bunch of individuals who have never played sports before, sit behind a
desk, write about sports simply because they were always picked last in dodge
ball and have never been able to let go of their fantasy of playing in college
to show all those mean boys from high school that they were better than JV
material, and analyze stats and players. Tournaments are perfect to because it
doesn’t matter what someone says, you need to lace up your shoes and play. The
beauty of a tournament format to determine the champion is that the unthinkable
happens; players get hurt, teams come ready to play or are mentally not
prepared, mistakes are made, momentum swings, calls are missed, the underdog
wins, excitement builds up towards a match up that no one saw coming, anything
can happen when you have a tournament. I love that!
I know, the
money the bowls make is crazy, and the NCAA is hard pressed to pass up an opportunity
to make more money. So here’s my “insane” thought for a playoff system in
college football. Ready? We take the top 24 teams and put them in a bracketed
tournament. It may sound crazy, I know, but hear me out. The 10 conference
champions earn automatic bids, and the remaining 14 teams are at-large berths
based on strength of schedule, season performances, common opponents, you know…the
regular criteria used for every other college football national championship
tournament that the NCAA has…and the criteria for the NCAA national
championships for every other sport besides football. Yes there will be teams
left out, but that’s part of it. At least the major contenders will have a
chance and there will be enough underdogs to make the tournament interesting.
Coaches of
the participating schools seed all the teams 1 – 24 (they cannot seed their own
team). Top eight teams get byes first round, and the rest are paired up in the
bracket based on their seeding. You could even have four regions so you have
four groups of six teams and they are all ranked 1 – 6; #3 would play #6 and #4
plays #5. Lowest seeded team that wins go plays #1, highest seeded team that
wins goes on to plays #2. The NFL does this already, so the NCAA can just copy
that since it works really well. I say this because the NCAA has shown they
have very difficult time coming up with their own original ideas nowadays. Look
at how long they have held on to the bowl game system.
Here’s the
part that the NCAA will just drool over. All the bowl game locations, bowl
names, and sponsorships that they have always had are still used, but now they host
the eight first round games. Don’t want to lose any money here, and in fact,
more money will come pouring in! These games can all be played at the smaller
bowls that no one really cares about anyways, giving those bowls a bit of
prestige and a huge boost in attendance and revenue. No one really cares about
the Raycom Media Camellia Bowl now. But you make that bowl game the first round
of the national tournament? BOOM! Instant coverage and way more sponsorship! You’re
welcome…I take cash or check NCAA.
The next round is where the top
eight teams come in, we get another eight games, and now we play at the higher
bowls (Peach, Citrus, Cotton, Outback, Gator. You know, the ones people
actually know about). More people watch these bowls, but you make them big-time
bowls now because you got the top eight teams in the nation taking on the
underdogs. You get more media coverage and more major sponsorship than you know
what to do with here. How, in your right mind, could you pass up an opportunity
like this? Answer: you can’t! Again NCAA, cash or check is fine.
Now we really get going, because we
are down to the elite eight. These four games will be played at the Rose,
Fiesta, Sugar, and Orange Bowls. Why those four locations? Oh, because these
are the four “major” bowl games from the past, and we want to keep that
pretentious attitude alive for tradition’s sake. Make these bowls feel as if
they still matter. Just to give you an idea at how crazy these four bowls are,
the Rose Bowl has a freaking committee where all they do is get ready for the
next Rose Bowl all year long until January 1st…and the members get
paid six figures to do this! It’s an insane amount of money involved for just
one game per year! To give the people that run these bowl games the feeling of
power that they want, they can rotate to get the premiere draws. One year the
Fiesta Bowl will get to pick the top game, the next year the Sugar Bowl gets to
pick, and so on, so they feel important to the process still. It boggles my
mind, however, because no matter what game goes where they will all draw huge
crowds for the lone reason that now these games mean something because all
these teams are a step away from the semi-finals! There would be trumpets
blasting a very uplifting and inspirational song right now. Or, at least in my
head there is.
We now
reach the final four teams, the crème de la crème, and the last three games. What
we do at this stage is put these semi-final and championship games into major
NFL stadiums, rotating the cities in which they are played at every year. The
sites and cities will have to pander to the NCAA to get the games, just like
they do to the NFL to get the Super Bowl. The NCAA would love this as they love
to feel super-duper important when it comes to their college football, and they
already do this shit with their basketball tournament so they know how the
process works. The NCAA still makes all their money and more, gets all the
advertising and sponsorship they could ever wish to have, and they get to have
a legitimate national champion that the fans want! And if there are any bowls
left out of the tournament, those bowls can pick up other teams that didn’t
make the cut and still have their Preparation H Hemorrhoid Protection Bowl, or
whatever. Not a hard plan to initiate and we won’t have to wait for a month and
a half for the stupid bowl games to start. Games every week right after the
season, and all the games are important, and everyone will watch even if their
team didn’t make it because it’s a FREAKING PLAYOFF FOR COLLEGE FOOTBALL WHICH
WILL BE SO AWESOME!
College
football has gotten so large and so money hungry that the NCAA has forgotten
what the basis of their precious game is. We want to determine who has the best
team through the regular season, and then who has the best team when it matters
in the post season and all the drama the playoffs bring with it. We as fans
want a true national champion. We want to see games that matter every Saturday
from December through January. We want to see adversity, hardship, drama,
upsets, comebacks, emotion, and passion in a game that has been soiled by
money. Bring back what made college football great; college kids who may never
see the NFL field fighting for their dreams of brining home a national title to
their school. It’s that pride players have in wearing their school colors that I
love about college football. But to bring that passion back to big time college
football, the NCAA has to do something it has been unwilling to do since it
started. Make it a real tournament.
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