Just A Heads Up NCAA, Four Teams Do Not Make A Playoff

            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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