Rick Chen misses the over-arching point, which Christopher Zheng makes succinctly: Limiting it to these four teams will continue to increase the gap in recruiting. It's a self-perpetuating cycle that precludes other schools from ascending in competition. Something has to be done to even the playing field as far as recruiting goes, and the way to do that is to allow schools that normally aren't given an opportunity to compete at the highest level. An 8-team playoff, almost exactly as Andy has posited, is the absolute correct way to go: Each of the P5 champions + (in my opinion) the remaining 3 teams with THE BEST OVERALL WIN-LOSS %. This allows even complete nobody's a chance, and even more than seeing the best of the best, American's love the underdog story.
"If you want to compete against the "blue-blood" teams of college football, schedule some marquee non-conference games against the best teams and win. Do not blame the system."
My issue with this statement is that there are no regulations within CFB in terms of scheduling, so any team that can realistically beat any of the main contenders will never get a chance to end up on their schedule.
Agreed, this isn't like basketball where there are a lot of non-conference dates to fill so most programs aren't really able to fill the schedule with patsies. In football there are only 3 or 4 dates to fill each year and there is a strong financial incentive to only schedule one good opponent and then a couple of easy wins.
As of right now, the two teams that get to the Championship end up playing 15 games if they play in their Conference Championship. 12 regular season, 1 Conference Championship, i playoff and 1 Final. So here is what I would propose to make it WAY more exciting. Teams should play 11 games and eliminate conference championships; they are meaningless when it comes to the final 4 anyway. The 16 top ranked teams in the BCS would qualify for the playoffs, every other team would get one more more post season game. The none playoff teams would end up playing 12 games, the last game could be a bowl game. They would have a playoff where the winner progresses. The max number of addition games in the season would be 4. This the final 2 would end up playing 15 games, just like they do now. The great thing about an expanded playoff is that there would be underdogs and Cinderella stories. How far would the Boise State team that beat Oklahoma advance? How far would the UCF team that beat Auburn advance? It would be an incredible spectacle, huge for fans and a humongous money maker for sure. Where these games are played tbd, but I would not mind neutral fields.
yeah, the current system is just a compromise to have playoffs and keep the bowl system. but the problem is the same or worse if you just expand the number of playoff games, with these pseudo bowl+playoff hybrid games. are teams now playing in multiple bowl games?
maybe the answer is to play out the old bowl system in it's entirety FIRST, letting the collective bowls and traditions decide who plays who, and then have a 4 team seeded playoff as a separate entity after that.
so you have 3 seasons that are distinguished from one another: regular, bowl, playoffs
you market the hell out of the traditional aspect of the "bowl season" and let them shake-up the eventual top-4 the best they can. the ncaa then ends up with 3 extra post-season games overall, instead of the current 1. the door is still open to the same top 4 voting controversy, but you've added some luster back to the bowl games (with some suped up marketing) and you get potentially more variation in the final 4 from year to year because of how the bowls shake up and influence the voting.
winning the first playoff game is then no longer viewed as a real accomplishment (like winning a bowl) but just gets two teams one step closer. the glory comes from winning your bowl game in the bowl season, and then for the one team who wins the playoffs.
Bowls + playoff is the best solution I've come across (with variants sometimes popping up on r/cfb). Ss you say, a top-4 could be selected from the NY6 bowl winners. But our goal should be to remove those arbitrary decisions.
To reduce as much resistance as possible, we can even keep the New Years 6 bowls as the "eighthfinals"—we could add a couple bowls (choose from Citrus, Alamo, maybe LV?) to get to 8 games and to even out conference tie-ins and geography, or we can keep it at 6 and reward the top 2 teams with a quarterfinal bye.
This pushes the season a bit longer, but it'll still wrap up before the Super Bowl (and timing the CFB championship game with the week before the SB might even be ideal). Or we could push the NY6/8 games a week or two earlier to finish up around the same time as we do now. Other bowl games would take place in the meantime, scheduled between premier bowl/playoff weekends.
I agree, one main goal is to widen the number of teams who have an opportunity, but I think just as important (or more) is reviving the tradition and "sanctity" of the bowl games. Big10 vs Pac in the Rose Bowl being the one I care about, ha.
Some other variations of including more of the bowls into a hybrid playoff would improve the equity of the current system, and maybe curb some of the recent player opt-out trend, but I think you still lose something IF the playoff seeding is determining those bowl matchups.
Also, any seeding controversy aside, in terms of marketing, they can change what is currently the first playoff round to be more like a "play-in" game to get to the championship. Strip it of its bowl game status, ditch the trophy presentation, you havent really won anything yet in this game. This could be a double-header on a Saturday afternoon, rather than the current prime time monday night event that spotlights those perrenial top 4 teams. Let the major bowls be their own big events and play them up on tv, then a quick one day play-in among the post-bowl-season selected top 4 before you go all-in on the championship game as a big event. (again, still not fair..)
The current system has pretty much created TV events that model the NFL's conference championships and Superbowl, and really diminished the bowl season.
I think if they took this full bowl season + separate post season approach originally (before the BCS or current playoffs), the bowls might be in much better shape now.
Granted, times change, even if I dont!
I agree, some variation of including more of the bowls into a hybrid playoff would improve the equity of the current system (and maybe curb some of the recent player opt-out trends as mentioned in the article), but I think we're still fundamentally missing something IF those premier bowl matchups are being determined by the playoff seeding. Big10 vs Pac in the Rose Bowl being the one I care about, ha.
The current system has pretty much created TV events that model the NFL's conference championships and Superbowl, and really diminished the college football tradition.
I think if they took this full bowl season + separate post season approach originally (before the BCS or current playoffs), the bowls would probably be in much better shape now.
Granted, times change, even if I dont!
And yet, one more option: Go back to no Championship game! Tradition and equity was probably better back then across the board, and considering 95% of programs rarely even have a shot what does it even matter to the real fans out there? (the reality of TV dollars aside).
Something (anything) that creates a better opportunity for more teams to get further (vs. 3-4 elite teams getting there almost all the time because they get the majority of the elite recruits) will lead to the better distribution of those elite recruits, and more teams that actually have a realistic chance. There will always be a handful of more elite teams because there will be better run programs that also have economic and geographic advantages, but right now there isn't enough opportunity for other well run programs to advance from "very good" top 10-15 to that elite level.
I'm with you! Keeping the current bowls lets the key bowl tie-ins continue, as long as we're willing to miss out on some matchup optimization (e.g., if #1 and #2 in the country are Pac-12 and Big-10 champs, then they'll meet up in the Rose Bowl, not be set up to meet in the championship game).
It needs to be expanded to allow for all P5 conference champions to make the playoff, plus some wild cards. My personal preference would be to expand it to 16, to allow all FBS conference champions, period, to qualify, and there would still be 6 at-large spots for the other teams. That gives everyone a reasonable shot at making it and might help spread out the wealth rather than concentrating it among just a few programs.
Or just go back to the old bowl system, but that's not going to happen.
I think expanding to eight teams would benefit college football. The gulf between the three perennial powerhouses and the rest of the field is immense. But the way it's going right now no Pac-12 team will (almost) ever make it to the final or even the top four. It would be nice to see a "hot" team that is jelling at the end of the season make the playoffs. I also agree that it has debased the bowl system considerably. Teams used to make a bowl game and conclude their season on a high note, while there was still a mystery as to which team was the best in any given year. That was part of the fun.
The CFP was a minor upgrade but it is still not a good system. Because we all know OSU, Bama, and Clemson are the top teams, they have extreme advantages when recruiting 5* players. Additionally one of the issues is that even the current CFP games are often not even close. All 3 games this year were blowouts and were decided before the 4th quarter.
To Rick's point about scheduling non-conference matchups, Alabama and the SEC schedule cupcake non-conference games and then claim it's "out of their hands."
One of the reasons why March Madness has better ratings and more attention is because there are 8+ teams that can realistically win. In college football, there are 1-2 teams each year max.
One thing expansion can help with is it would expand the field beyond the normal 4-6 candidates to 12-14, so the talent pool wouldn't be as concentrated to those programs and there might be more of a localization impact.
Rick Chen misses the over-arching point, which Christopher Zheng makes succinctly: Limiting it to these four teams will continue to increase the gap in recruiting. It's a self-perpetuating cycle that precludes other schools from ascending in competition. Something has to be done to even the playing field as far as recruiting goes, and the way to do that is to allow schools that normally aren't given an opportunity to compete at the highest level. An 8-team playoff, almost exactly as Andy has posited, is the absolute correct way to go: Each of the P5 champions + (in my opinion) the remaining 3 teams with THE BEST OVERALL WIN-LOSS %. This allows even complete nobody's a chance, and even more than seeing the best of the best, American's love the underdog story.
Better than not having it, but until it goes to 8 teams, I'm meh.
"If you want to compete against the "blue-blood" teams of college football, schedule some marquee non-conference games against the best teams and win. Do not blame the system."
My issue with this statement is that there are no regulations within CFB in terms of scheduling, so any team that can realistically beat any of the main contenders will never get a chance to end up on their schedule.
Agreed, this isn't like basketball where there are a lot of non-conference dates to fill so most programs aren't really able to fill the schedule with patsies. In football there are only 3 or 4 dates to fill each year and there is a strong financial incentive to only schedule one good opponent and then a couple of easy wins.
Also, the general consensus across CFB seems to be to just expand to 8 with 5 P5 champions, the highest ranked G5 team, and 2 wild cards.
As of right now, the two teams that get to the Championship end up playing 15 games if they play in their Conference Championship. 12 regular season, 1 Conference Championship, i playoff and 1 Final. So here is what I would propose to make it WAY more exciting. Teams should play 11 games and eliminate conference championships; they are meaningless when it comes to the final 4 anyway. The 16 top ranked teams in the BCS would qualify for the playoffs, every other team would get one more more post season game. The none playoff teams would end up playing 12 games, the last game could be a bowl game. They would have a playoff where the winner progresses. The max number of addition games in the season would be 4. This the final 2 would end up playing 15 games, just like they do now. The great thing about an expanded playoff is that there would be underdogs and Cinderella stories. How far would the Boise State team that beat Oklahoma advance? How far would the UCF team that beat Auburn advance? It would be an incredible spectacle, huge for fans and a humongous money maker for sure. Where these games are played tbd, but I would not mind neutral fields.
yeah, the current system is just a compromise to have playoffs and keep the bowl system. but the problem is the same or worse if you just expand the number of playoff games, with these pseudo bowl+playoff hybrid games. are teams now playing in multiple bowl games?
maybe the answer is to play out the old bowl system in it's entirety FIRST, letting the collective bowls and traditions decide who plays who, and then have a 4 team seeded playoff as a separate entity after that.
so you have 3 seasons that are distinguished from one another: regular, bowl, playoffs
you market the hell out of the traditional aspect of the "bowl season" and let them shake-up the eventual top-4 the best they can. the ncaa then ends up with 3 extra post-season games overall, instead of the current 1. the door is still open to the same top 4 voting controversy, but you've added some luster back to the bowl games (with some suped up marketing) and you get potentially more variation in the final 4 from year to year because of how the bowls shake up and influence the voting.
winning the first playoff game is then no longer viewed as a real accomplishment (like winning a bowl) but just gets two teams one step closer. the glory comes from winning your bowl game in the bowl season, and then for the one team who wins the playoffs.
Bowls + playoff is the best solution I've come across (with variants sometimes popping up on r/cfb). Ss you say, a top-4 could be selected from the NY6 bowl winners. But our goal should be to remove those arbitrary decisions.
To reduce as much resistance as possible, we can even keep the New Years 6 bowls as the "eighthfinals"—we could add a couple bowls (choose from Citrus, Alamo, maybe LV?) to get to 8 games and to even out conference tie-ins and geography, or we can keep it at 6 and reward the top 2 teams with a quarterfinal bye.
This pushes the season a bit longer, but it'll still wrap up before the Super Bowl (and timing the CFB championship game with the week before the SB might even be ideal). Or we could push the NY6/8 games a week or two earlier to finish up around the same time as we do now. Other bowl games would take place in the meantime, scheduled between premier bowl/playoff weekends.
I agree, one main goal is to widen the number of teams who have an opportunity, but I think just as important (or more) is reviving the tradition and "sanctity" of the bowl games. Big10 vs Pac in the Rose Bowl being the one I care about, ha.
Some other variations of including more of the bowls into a hybrid playoff would improve the equity of the current system, and maybe curb some of the recent player opt-out trend, but I think you still lose something IF the playoff seeding is determining those bowl matchups.
Also, any seeding controversy aside, in terms of marketing, they can change what is currently the first playoff round to be more like a "play-in" game to get to the championship. Strip it of its bowl game status, ditch the trophy presentation, you havent really won anything yet in this game. This could be a double-header on a Saturday afternoon, rather than the current prime time monday night event that spotlights those perrenial top 4 teams. Let the major bowls be their own big events and play them up on tv, then a quick one day play-in among the post-bowl-season selected top 4 before you go all-in on the championship game as a big event. (again, still not fair..)
The current system has pretty much created TV events that model the NFL's conference championships and Superbowl, and really diminished the bowl season.
I think if they took this full bowl season + separate post season approach originally (before the BCS or current playoffs), the bowls might be in much better shape now.
Granted, times change, even if I dont!
I agree, some variation of including more of the bowls into a hybrid playoff would improve the equity of the current system (and maybe curb some of the recent player opt-out trends as mentioned in the article), but I think we're still fundamentally missing something IF those premier bowl matchups are being determined by the playoff seeding. Big10 vs Pac in the Rose Bowl being the one I care about, ha.
The current system has pretty much created TV events that model the NFL's conference championships and Superbowl, and really diminished the college football tradition.
I think if they took this full bowl season + separate post season approach originally (before the BCS or current playoffs), the bowls would probably be in much better shape now.
Granted, times change, even if I dont!
And yet, one more option: Go back to no Championship game! Tradition and equity was probably better back then across the board, and considering 95% of programs rarely even have a shot what does it even matter to the real fans out there? (the reality of TV dollars aside).
Something (anything) that creates a better opportunity for more teams to get further (vs. 3-4 elite teams getting there almost all the time because they get the majority of the elite recruits) will lead to the better distribution of those elite recruits, and more teams that actually have a realistic chance. There will always be a handful of more elite teams because there will be better run programs that also have economic and geographic advantages, but right now there isn't enough opportunity for other well run programs to advance from "very good" top 10-15 to that elite level.
I'm with you! Keeping the current bowls lets the key bowl tie-ins continue, as long as we're willing to miss out on some matchup optimization (e.g., if #1 and #2 in the country are Pac-12 and Big-10 champs, then they'll meet up in the Rose Bowl, not be set up to meet in the championship game).
I've got a major reply fail here inside my browser. Nevermind! ha
Pretty good idea there.
It needs to be expanded to allow for all P5 conference champions to make the playoff, plus some wild cards. My personal preference would be to expand it to 16, to allow all FBS conference champions, period, to qualify, and there would still be 6 at-large spots for the other teams. That gives everyone a reasonable shot at making it and might help spread out the wealth rather than concentrating it among just a few programs.
Or just go back to the old bowl system, but that's not going to happen.
I think expanding to eight teams would benefit college football. The gulf between the three perennial powerhouses and the rest of the field is immense. But the way it's going right now no Pac-12 team will (almost) ever make it to the final or even the top four. It would be nice to see a "hot" team that is jelling at the end of the season make the playoffs. I also agree that it has debased the bowl system considerably. Teams used to make a bowl game and conclude their season on a high note, while there was still a mystery as to which team was the best in any given year. That was part of the fun.
The CFP was a minor upgrade but it is still not a good system. Because we all know OSU, Bama, and Clemson are the top teams, they have extreme advantages when recruiting 5* players. Additionally one of the issues is that even the current CFP games are often not even close. All 3 games this year were blowouts and were decided before the 4th quarter.
To Rick's point about scheduling non-conference matchups, Alabama and the SEC schedule cupcake non-conference games and then claim it's "out of their hands."
One of the reasons why March Madness has better ratings and more attention is because there are 8+ teams that can realistically win. In college football, there are 1-2 teams each year max.
One thing expansion can help with is it would expand the field beyond the normal 4-6 candidates to 12-14, so the talent pool wouldn't be as concentrated to those programs and there might be more of a localization impact.