Box Score Beat

The College Football Playoff Solution

Posted on 31. Jan, 2009 by Michael Preston in Sports Journalism

Box Score Beat is proud to introduce first-time contributor Michael Preston. Preston completed his undergraduate work at the University of Virginia and currently attends the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. An avid college football fan, Preston decided to tackle the hot issue of the elusive Division 1 football playoff in his first post. What follows is an analysis of the best ideas the sports journalism world has offered on the topic — as well as those they may have left out. Enjoy.        –Ed

Even though it’s been several weeks since the Florida Gators won their second national title in three seasons, there’s still considerable grumbling about who really should have been playing against the Gators. The upstart Utes of Utah who thrashed the mighty Crimson Tide? Or maybe USC, a team that looked unstoppable since their mid-season loss at Oregon State?

Fans and pundits decry the Bowl Championship Series, or BCS, for not tying things off with a nice little bow. How, they say, will we ever get a true, undisputed national champion with this BCS mucking things up? What we need is a playoff!

The irony of this situation is that the BCS itself isn’t really preventing a college football playoff. In fact, as ACC Commissioner John Swofford argues, the BCS is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do:

The purpose of the BCS arrangement is to match the No. 1 and No. 2 teams as part of the bowl system while creating other competitive and exciting matchups between highly regarded teams. That goal is being fulfilled.

Despite Swofford’s claim, denizens of internet sports chat boards derisively call the BCS title game the “MNC,” an acronym for “mythical national championship,” because, in their opinion, the best team in the country can’t be determined through the current system.

But if fans really want a playoff, what can be done? I have two suggestions, both of which are somewhat radical, but they address, in different ways, the problems that actually leave fans and coaches at each other’s throats after the final polls come out:

1. Abolish pre-season rankings
I know, blasphemy! What would people fight about in August? But think about it: the Utes didn’t get screwed because of the BCS (though that admittedly didn’t help); they got screwed because they came into the season ranked 28th in the USA Today/Coaches Poll and 29th in the A.P. poll — well behind underachieving teams like Clemson (the consensus #9 team preseason), Tennessee (consensus #18) and Wake Forest (consensus #23), none of whom finished the season ranked.

Justin Hokanson, a Senior Editor at Bleacher Report, made the obvious point about pre-season polls:

Overcoming a low, or even non-ranking in a preseason poll is the most difficult obstacle for an undefeated team to overcome on the road to the national championship.  With the addition of the BCS, this has become even more important since if you aren’t number one or number two, you have no shot at a title. Strength of schedule also has become more important in winning a title.

Non-BCS conference teams like Utah are at a clear disadvantage here because of the importance of the polls vis a vis the BCS rankings. If a team starts the season ranked outside the top twenty-five, they obviously have to be not only good, but also extremely lucky, as they need a slew of losses from the teams ranked ahead of them to crack the top 10, which is where you need to be before you can reasonably start talking about contending for a national championship. Additionally, preseason polls are not always accurate in predicting postseason results. For example, the 2008 A.P. pre and post-season top 10 share only four teams in common: Florida, Ohio State, Oklahoma and USC. The Coaches’ Poll fares just slightly better with five teams making the top 10 in both polls: Florida, Georgia, Oklahoma, Texas and USC. In any event, given how much money is tied up in the BCS games, you’d want better than a 40% or 50% chance of being in striking distance for a slot in either the Fiesta, Orange, Rose or Sugar Bowls if possible.

If it were up to me, I’d release the initial top 25 rankings the first week of October. Why? By game six or so, everybody is firmly into their conference schedule and we can start to see how teams measure up against programs with (roughly) the same level of talent. Frankly, I’m not impressed with teams that spend the first two months of their seasons going 6-0 by beating up on the sisters of the poor and the voters shouldn’t be, either. Teams that are pretenders will probably have stumbled by now, but, equally as important, teams that may have otherwise gone overlooked might have some big wins under their belts that would help them get some national attention. We’re also better able to assess the toll of in-season injuries on a team by this point.

The best part of this is that the BCS rankings, which are released around the middle of October, don’t have to be moved at all. They would simply come out a week or two after the other polls were released. They would still retain their importance with the added bonus that they would paint a more accurate picture of who the best teams really are.

2. Blow up the current bowl system and drop a regular season game (or two)
Toss the Texas Bowl (Rice v. W. Michigan), pass on the Papa John’s Bowl (Rutgers v. NC State) and drive the Meineke Car Care Bowl (UNC v. West Virginia) off a cliff. The proliferation of second, third and fourth tier bowls simply serve to cheapen the overall quality of play. Do we really need 32 bowl games between December 20 and January 8? Does it make sense to have 64 teams playing post-season football in what is supposed to be an elite sport? That constitutes over half of the eligible teams in Division I. College football is not like little league baseball where every kid is promised a chance to bat and a trophy at the end of the year. Teams with 6-6 and 7-5 records don’t need to be playing once the regular season ends.

But besides the fact that mediocrity doesn’t need to be celebrated, the real reason to scrap these lower bowls is because they’re littering the calendar at a time when a playoff could be going on. Division I-A and Division I-AA started their regular seasons on the same day in 2008 (August 28), but the eventual Division I-AA champion Richmond Spiders had already won two playoff games by December 7, the day the Gators played in their conference title game. Florida then went more than a month between the SEC title game and the BCS title game. Ohio State ended its regular season against Michigan on November 22; their next game, the Fiesta Bowl against Texas, was played on January 5 — over seven weeks since they last stepped on a field. That is, in a word, ridiculous.

Additionally, if we’re serious about a playoff, let’s eliminate one or two games from the regular season, as suggested by Washington Post columnist Fred Bowen:

The only fair way to find out which team is the best, as our president-elect has said, is to have a playoff among the top eight teams. After all, almost every college sport decides its national champion on the field of play.

But I also hope that college football fans noticed everything our next president said. Obama said college teams could “trim back on the regular season.” In other words, if college football teams and fans want a playoff system, they should give up at least one or two games during the regular season.

That makes sense. Most big-time college football teams play 12 games during the season plus a league championship. If they added three games for an eight-team playoff, some teams would play 16 games. That’s a pro schedule! College players are supposed to be student-athletes.

Along those lines, early season college football games are mostly a waste of time. There’s nothing gained by watching Alabama beat the snot out of, say, a Louisiana-Monroe — the outcome is a foregone conclusion probably 80% of the time. Just get into the conference season earlier and prove your mettle by actually beating good teams.

So, how do we get from those steps to a playoff? Here’s a possible solution: For the leagues that currently have conference title games, roll the start of their season back a week or two, so that the majority of teams are wrapping things up at roughly the same time. For example, have the SEC (or ACC or Big XII) start their season the weekend of August 23. The players will already be on campus anyway, so it’s not like it’s a major inconvenience. Combine the roll-back with a loss of a bye week and you could have the regular season and title games done in mid-November, start your playoffs with an additional bye week for rest (if needed) and have almost a month, yes, a month, of high stakes, playoff college football. Do you want to try to tell me that there wouldn’t be interest in seeing this system implemented?  Jon Stonger of Heretical Ideas lays out a good vision of what a 12 team Division I playoff system would look like:

To make up for the weaknesses of the 8 and 16 team playoffs, there needs to be a system that rewards teams for winning their conference, and keeps the tradition and rivalry of conference play alive by automatically including the conference champ.

On the other hand, we need to allow every team with a legitimate claim to the national title a chance to prove it on the field.

By having a playoff with the 6 conference champions and 6 at-large slots, both of these goals can be accomplished. Furthermore, the top 4 conference champions would be further rewarded with a bye in the tournament.

In 2007, this would have meant that Ohio State, LSU, Virginia Tech and Oklahoma all got first round byes, due to their conference titles and high rankings. Georgia, Missouri, Kansas, Hawaii, Arizona State and Illinois would all have gotten in based on their rankings.

This year, depending on how the season plays out, it could be any of Texas, Oklahoma, Texas Tech, Utah, Boise St, USC, Alabama and Florida included as wild cards.

Twelve seems to be the right number to me. It lets the good teams in while keeping out some of the dross (unless you win the ACC or Big East- but that can’t be helped). The conference season would still be important since the champions have automatic bids and potential byes. If Oklahoma beats Texas Tech on Saturday, there will be three teams in the Big 12 with one loss. Those three teams (Oklahoma, Texas Tech, and Texas) are among the best 6 or 7 teams in the entire country. Any playoff that excludes one of these teams is incomplete, inadequate, and unfair.

Seems simple, no?

I suspect the two main arguments against these kinds of change would have something to do with ending the existing bowl “tradition” and the money lost by schools no longer getting a chance to participate in post-season play.

In regards to tradition, the four games that really matter (the Fiesta, Orange, Rose and Sugar Bowls) can all be kept in place. My idea, which jibes with Stonger’s, is that the opening round games would be played on the campuses of the highest ranked teams in the field that did not receive a bye. Once the second round of the playoffs starts, each major bowl could be a host site. Two national semi-final games would have to be created, setting up a Final Four, if you will. These games, along with the BCS title game, would be played at a neutral site.

As to the financial hit that teams would take without the additional bow revenue, I say “tough luck.” College football isn’t supposed to be about the money (even though we all know that it is). You shouldn’t be basing your athletic department’s budgets around uncertainties like bowls in the first place.

Does this proposal have any chance of working? Probably not. The simple fact that there would be fewer games would probably hurt the networks, and I can’t see 52 teams voluntarily giving up on revenue and the chance to get their football teams another month of sanctioned practice time.

Still, though, this would provide one of the clearest paths to having a true consensus national champion. And isn’t that what everyone has been begging for all along?

Tags: BCS, college football, playoffs