I’ve always given Dan Wetzel a lot of credit. Ever since I left childhood behind there was this thought inside me that sneered at bowl games and welcomed a new college football post-season format. When I read Wetzel’s “Death to the BCS” years later in 2010 I was completely sold.
Even then, the push back to a playoff was really strong–people forget this! Some didn’t want it and many, many, many others wouldn’t believe it was going to happen any time soon.
Seven years later we’re already 3 years into the College Football Playoff Era!
One of the aspects of the playoff which has always fascinated me and countless others is how it impacts the regular season. I always mocked the romanticism surrounding the undefeated season in college football because I didn’t think it was worth being the hill to die on concerning whether or not to implement a playoff.
Undefeated/Untied National Champions
Playoff Era (2014-16): 0/3
BCS (1998-2013): 9/16
Bowl Alliance (1995-97): 2/3
Bowl Coalition (1992-94): 2/3
AP (1980-1991): 7/12
TOTAL: 20/37
We’ve always talked about college football being special and about it being different. That more than any other sport all the games mattered during the regular season. One loss, and you’re out. Or, at least one loss and your chances for a championship could be on life support.
We have a pretty long history through several different post-season systems that has given us National Champions who had blemishes on their record. Plus, we’re not even talking about the teams who have finished undefeated without a title or the past shared titles. That’s an argument for another day.
The other issue that accelerated during the BCS era was the watering down of schedules in order to remain undefeated. That was unseemly, needed to change badly, and we’re still witnessing the effects of that change today. Isn’t it kind of crazy that conferences are forcing their members not to play FCS teams and play Power 5 opponents?
Factor in the corruption surrounding many of the bowl games and the old system was crumbling from the inside, far quicker than most realized.
Still, we’ve seen 3 champions crowned so far in the playoff era and none of them have been undefeated. Deep down, we know being undefeated doesn’t mean as much as it used to which we all saw coming.
How we process this change comes down to two main issues: The tug and pull between how the playoffs take away from the regular season OR add to the regular season plus how much you find sacred about college football’s traditional (whatever this means to you) regular season.
From interacting with so many college football fans I feel like the second issue has largely been conceded by the traditional crowd. As many in the pro-playoff crowd wisely guessed the new system was going to be far too much fun to be criticized heavily. I’m not saying this approach is wrong per se, but we have gotten into the deep weeds discussing right vs. wrong for the best system–and even what ‘best’ truly means.
There’s a time and place for that discussion, however, from an entertainment standpoint the playoff era offers a far better product and that’s really important.
The first issue is a little murkier. It’s a small sample size so far but I don’t think the playoff has done as good of a job as I thought of making the regular season better and more entertaining. Last year pretty much sucked on this front. Alabama didn’t lose until the the title game and the 3 other teams who did lose were taken down on October 22nd (Ohio State) and November 12th (Washington, Clemson).
It’s kind of odd how our perceptions of losses, and more importantly, when you lose shapes narratives. It’s generally accepted that it’s best to lose early once in September and have a long time to recover. Yet, we have a habit of watching that early loss and dismissing a team quickly, perhaps an aftershock of the BCS era we haven’t completely dropped yet? Then, we think losing late is incredibly dangerous, yet it wasn’t for 3 of the playoff teams last year. We also watch these teams for 8 to 10 weeks and already feel like they’re the best typically because they haven’t lost yet.
Last year wasn’t the best as I said. We saw a small handful of teams move into the top of the group and the teams who would end up close to playoffs (Penn State, USC, Oklahoma) all lost at least 2 games early and couldn’t recover. There was some drama with the Michigan vs. Ohio State game but the Wolverines only had a boring game against Indiana between their loss and facing the Buckeyes. It wasn’t much drama at all.
Two years ago the regular season was definitely enhanced by the playoffs. We had 6 teams with only 1-loss or who were undefeated at the unveiling of the final rankings. We might occasionally get better but you can’t really ask for more. Clemson (undefeated) and Alabama (lone early loss) took some drama out of things but Michigan State, Iowa, Oklahoma, Ohio State, and Notre Dame (plus Stanford’s late charge!) were all battling for two spots until the last week and thus increased the value of the regular season.
But to get back to the perception thing again. One of the difficult things to assess with the playoff making the regular season better is when a team loses dramatically and is “unofficially” eliminated while opening the door for another program or two. When team’s are undefeated we know we’re potentially witnessing a championship run. When a team that lost early (we like to throw them aside sometimes remember?) suddenly is in the mix late in the season we haven’t had the same sense of romanticism attached to their run.
This points out what makes college football (still) pretty awesome, playoff or not. There are so many different ways to evaluate the entertainment of a season. We just need more seasons like 2015 instead of 2016.
The one thing I’ll note about the playoff system, is that there’s so much less drama in the early season games. Before, with the way the BCS tended to play out, I’d watch more teams that I don’t watch now, because those early season games mattered. Now, if you lose early in a close game, it feels less important.
Of course, this is offset by teams be more willing to schedule tougher opponents all year. But I do miss that early season drama in games being played by teams I normally wouldn’t care about at all. A bad loss does nothing to you if it’s in the first half of the season.
I think it’s also worth noting that half of the first round playoff games so far have been absolute blowouts. It almost seems like the build up to the playoff has been more exciting than the actual playoff itself in its first three seasons.
I’ll admit, while I think the BCS wasn’t perfect, I still wasn’t a fan of the playoff format. It’s starting to grow on me although I do think it needs to be expanded to 8 teams. Five conference champs plus three at-large with the seeding decided by the committee. I think it would put more value on the regular season because winning your conference is now a guarantee into the playoff but it doesn’t punish teams that drop a game late in the season despite being great all year long.
Conference champs should never get an auto-bid. It makes 1/4 (or 1/3 if you’re the SEC or ACC) of your schedule completely meaningless. In practice, a conference champ would always get in an 8-team playoff anyway, so there’s no need to legislate an auto-bid.
The other thing that needs to happen if they go to 8 is to eliminate conference title games. There is absolutely no reason to run college players out there for 16 games, and title games have become increasingly pointless in the days of one division constantly being far better than the other, as is the case in 3 of the 4 power leagues with divisions (only the Pac-12 is the exception). This would also prevent a situation like a nothing Florida team (as in 2016) upsetting Alabama and getting a completely undeserved playoff spot.
I woulndt mind a policy that says you get a bid if you win a conference where the collective conference strength is at some level of quality. I mean, I think the reason you dont like Auto bids is because invariably, one of the conferences will always be just awful and winning the conference isn’t really something to be proud of. I wonder if you could find a way to say, if you win the SEC, you’re auto in but if you win, say the B10 in a year where the two best teams had 2-3 losses apiece you have to get in through the at-large process.
That would also help CCG losers who get eliminated at the last second on one loss. Conceivably, if you had SEC 1-2 where the loser of the CG only ended with one loss, PAC same scenario, ACC same, BXII same, you could get 8 teams just from those conferences and you’d have 8 teams with only 1-2 losses instead of sending one of them home just so you could force a 3-loss INTEGER team in there.
So far my biggest complaint about the playoffs is the idea to play them on NYE. If you are in a relationship, you are either going out to dinner or to a party; if you are single, you are probably at a party or bar hopping with friends. Not to mention the fact that a lot of people work during the day on NYE, causing them to miss the first game. In my opinion, this is a horrible day for them to play these games. The other aspect that I don’t like is that there is about a month break between the end of the season and the playoffs – play the games right after the season ends. End of rant.
Im in a relationship and I never go out on NYE. What is this complaint about?
Spider-man is in a relationship without kids yet, I’m guessing.
They aren’t playing the games on NYE anymore unless it falls on a Saturday. They made a pretty big deal about it, so if this means that much to you, I’m not sure how you missed it.
Yeah, it’s just totally inconceivable that somebody might have missed out on some College Football procedural news.
My only one criticism, and I hope it can be fixed quickly, is there is still no real parity among football schedules. Sure, one team may play only FBS teams like the eventual national champion but how even are all of those games? We talked about Miami yesterday getting to miss the best teams in their conference during the season so how is that at all comparable to the likes of a team that has to run a gauntlet of in-conference games? I just wish there was a way to keep all schedules kind of hovering around the same mark. That would give us a much better comparison than just simply “lose early rather than late.”
This is also my problem with having a playoff that revolves around the 5 conference champions getting an automatic bid. You could have a Wisconsin team in some year with a non-conference blowout loss, 1 or 2 more losses over the course of the season, and then 1 good win in the conference championship game that makes it to the playoff. No thanks. Unbalanced schedules just create stupid records.
See above my idea for fixing this
I was a bit of a 4-team skeptic until the BCS decided to throw out their own “Every Game Counts” rhetoric and retroactively invalidate the biggest game of the 2011 regular season by forcing LSU to beat Alabama again (which, of course, they couldn’t). I imagine many former skeptics were in that boat with me. Once it became clear they were going to create a title game rematch, I quickly warmed up to a playoff.
Since then, I do think the 4-team playoff has been, overall, a boon to college football. First and foremost, the emphasis on good scheduling has led to so many more good matchups. Before the playoff era, you’d never have seen week 1 stacked with so many good games that networks started moving some of them to Sunday. This is the single biggest compliment I can give to the playoff, is that it’s led to more good regular-season games.
The other good thing about the playoff is that the season ends on a bit more of a high note. I never minded this as much as most, but CFB ending its season with a bunch of exhibitions (some high-level exhibitions, granted) followed by the one game that truly matters wasn’t as good as ending it with 3 high-level meaningful games within a week to 10 days has been. (Even if many of those games haven’t been good, which is more bad luck than anything else.)
I have been vocal about this before, but I think 4 is the perfect number. I don’t need auto-bids, I don’t need scads of 2-loss teams getting in, I don’t need us to add artificial meaning to games that aren’t meaningful late in November, and I don’t need to see season-long excellence be less of a factor in who wins it all. I also really don’t need to see games like Alabama vs. Boise State (this thing isn’t going to 8 without a Group of 5 auto-bid) and Clemson vs. (fill in team that lost a home game and a stupid road game to a bad team here). Those games would either be blowouts or result in the better team losing, and both of those outcomes are annoying to me. There’s one sport – one – where it truly matters what you did in the regular season. Some people think that’s an anachronism. I think it’s what makes this sport the best of them all.
I think 4 teams gives you a great drama, keeps the regular season critical and is a huge improvement over the BCS. The one flaw is that cinderella will never get a shot. I could live with an 8-team format if it allowed teams like ’84 BYU, ’07 Boise State or ’14 TCU teams to have a shot. I do not believe they’d end up winning it all, but it would make for a great end to the season.