BCS going away in favor of 4 team playoff

[clenz]

more than likely.



Does the fact the FBS now have a "playoff" make the move better. I've read a lot of fans saying "if they had a playoff I'd be all for the move....as if your school ever had a shot to get INTO the playoff to begin with.

[89Hen]

What?

[clenz]

I'm following it on twitter but apparently there is a newsconference going on....

sounds like unless the presidents overrule commissioners who have spent hundreds of hours on this, the playoff is coming in 2014

[Grizalltheway]

Doesn't change my feelings on moving up. We'd still be "hoping" to make it to the lower-tier bowl, nothing more.

[grizzaholic]

Still won't be watching any of their games.

[Vidav]

Still won't be watching any of their games.

[SuperHornet]

Doesn't change my feelings on moving up. We'd still be "hoping" to make it to the lower-tier bowl, nothing more.

Still won't be watching any of their games.

[rkwittem]

Doesn't change my feelings on moving up. We'd still be "hoping" to make it to the lower-tier bowl, nothing more.

Still won't be watching any of their games.

Yet the peanut gallery still wants to comment anyway. If you don't watch or care, why comment?


(Unpopular opinion alert:)
Just for the record, I despise, loathe, and hate this move in every way possible. Basically, I hate playoffs. They seldom get the best teams from the regular season into the title game, even if their resume and body of work completely outclasses everyone else's.
The argument that "if they were the best team, they should have won" doesn't jive with me. If a 14 win NFL team loses to a 9 win team, does that mean the 9 win team is better? No. Only for that game. I think most people would agree that a team with 5 more wins than another is substantially better than the other.

Just give me #1 versus #2. For #3 on down, just match up the bowls so that they're great games. I don't care how, just do it. Eventually this monstrosity will grow and the regular season will become as relevant as college basketball's.

[bluehenbillk]

I don't get people on a college football board saying "I still won't be watching"??

Makes no sense to me. I'm a college football nut - I spend all day Saurday either at a game(s) or watching on TV.

[andy7171]

I don't get people on a college football board saying "I still won't be watching"??

Makes no sense to me. I'm a college football nut - I spend all day Saurday either at a game(s) or watching on TV.

This +6.93.


Makes you wonder if they ignore the NFL also?

[SuperHornet]

The problem with kw's idea is the age-old question: Who decides who the best team is? Left up to one person, the concept of bias is rarely left out. A computer is only as good as who programmed it. A LEGITIMATE playoff is the BEST way to decide a champion, PERIOD. The problem with this is that a four-team playoff out of more than 100 teams isn't really a playoff. It's more of a statement that "this thing is OURS (i.e. the power conferences), and you (i.e. the OTHER conferences) can't have it."

[rkwittem]

The problem with kw's idea is the age-old question: Who decides who the best team is? Left up to one person, the concept of bias is rarely left out. A computer is only as good as who programmed it. A LEGITIMATE playoff is the BEST way to decide a champion, PERIOD. The problem with this is that a four-team playoff out of more than 100 teams isn't really a playoff. It's more of a statement that "this thing is OURS (i.e. the power conferences), and you (i.e. the OTHER conferences) can't have it."

Playoffs are not the best way to determine champs. It's just the popular thing to say nowadays. People say they love the NCAA tournament, but it has killed their regular season and letting garbage like Butler into the Final Four kills ratings and the on-court product. Postseason sports are better off when left to the top 1% of the teams in that particular year. If you're not one of them, you need not apply.

[ASUG8]

The problem with kw's idea is the age-old question: Who decides who the best team is? Left up to one person, the concept of bias is rarely left out. A computer is only as good as who programmed it. A LEGITIMATE playoff is the BEST way to decide a champion, PERIOD. The problem with this is that a four-team playoff out of more than 100 teams isn't really a playoff. It's more of a statement that "this thing is OURS (i.e. the power conferences), and you (i.e. the OTHER conferences) can't have it."

Playoffs are not the best way to determine champs. It's just the popular thing to say nowadays. People say they love the NCAA tournament, but it has killed their regular season and letting garbage like Butler into the Final Four kills ratings and the on-court product. Postseason sports are better off when left to the top 1% of the teams in that particular year. If you're not one of them, you need not apply.

A 4 team playoff, while tiny, is a step in the right direction IMO. I doubt you agree with the whole arbitrary nature of the bowl system and the so-called "national championship" in BCS as it stands today. I expect that the playoffs will get generally good response from the fanbase and it will help at least somewhat legitimize that the best team wins the NC. Also, I expect that you'll see it expand just as FCS has over time.

I'm not really sure how you determine definitively who the top teams are when the weekly football (or basketball) polls from ESPN, SI, Sporting News, AP, USA Today, et al can't agree on it and all use different methodologies.

[Grizalltheway]

Yet the peanut gallery still wants to comment anyway. If you don't watch or care, why comment?


(Unpopular opinion alert:)
Just for the record, I despise, loathe, and hate this move in every way possible. Basically, I hate playoffs. They seldom get the best teams from the regular season into the title game, even if their resume and body of work completely outclasses everyone else's.
The argument that "if they were the best team, they should have won" doesn't jive with me. If a 14 win NFL team loses to a 9 win team, does that mean the 9 win team is better? No. Only for that game. I think most people would agree that a team with 5 more wins than another is substantially better than the other.

Just give me #1 versus #2. For #3 on down, just match up the bowls so that they're great games. I don't care how, just do it. Eventually this monstrosity will grow and the regular season will become as relevant as college basketball's.

You've gotta be kidding with this nonsense. In what way is the FCS regular season irrelevant, when you need to win at LEAST 7 of 11 games to have a chance at playing for the national championship? How much more boring would baseball be if they played 162 games, and then just pitted the top teams from each league in a one-off championship?

[UNI88]

Yet the peanut gallery still wants to comment anyway. If you don't watch or care, why comment?


(Unpopular opinion alert:)
Just for the record, I despise, loathe, and hate this move in every way possible. Basically, I hate playoffs. They seldom get the best teams from the regular season into the title game, even if their resume and body of work completely outclasses everyone else's.
The argument that "if they were the best team, they should have won" doesn't jive with me. If a 14 win NFL team loses to a 9 win team, does that mean the 9 win team is better? No. Only for that game. I think most people would agree that a team with 5 more wins than another is substantially better than the other.

Just give me #1 versus #2. For #3 on down, just match up the bowls so that they're great games. I don't care how, just do it. Eventually this monstrosity will grow and the regular season will become as relevant as college basketball's.

You've gotta be kidding with this nonsense. In what way is the FCS regular season irrelevant, when you need to win at LEAST 7 of 11 games to have a chance at playing for the national championship? How much more boring would baseball be if they played 162 games, and then just pitted the top teams from each league in a one-off championship?

I agree. I have two basic problems with saying you just pick the two best teams and let them play for the championship.

1) Professional leagues are much more homogeneous and it's a lot easier to judge teams because of consistent inter-division play. In college, it's a lot more difficult to judge teams from different conferences until you have the best of the best playing against each other in the playoffs.

2) Picking the 2 best teams isn't easy. In the BCS, there have been a number of circumstances when the choice of the 2nd best team has definitely been arguable. So the perceived 3rd best team is just screwed when that happens?
Stuart Mandel with SI did a pretty good job of comparing BCS reality to 4 team playoff ...

So when we total it up, a four-team playoff would have been more effective than the stand-alone title game 10 times in 14 years. That's certainly progress. But it's also true that the controversy won't fade. While there have been just three seasons (1999, 2002, 2005) in which the BCS title-game matchup was deemed universally satisfying, there were only four in which the four-team field was controversy free.

Read more: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2012/w ... z1yT3YUoPY" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[UNI88]

The problem with kw's idea is the age-old question: Who decides who the best team is? Left up to one person, the concept of bias is rarely left out. A computer is only as good as who programmed it. A LEGITIMATE playoff is the BEST way to decide a champion, PERIOD. The problem with this is that a four-team playoff out of more than 100 teams isn't really a playoff. It's more of a statement that "this thing is OURS (i.e. the power conferences), and you (i.e. the OTHER conferences) can't have it."

Playoffs are not the best way to determine champs. It's just the popular thing to say nowadays. People say they love the NCAA tournament, but it has killed their regular season and letting garbage like Butler into the Final Four kills ratings and the on-court product. Postseason sports are better off when left to the top 1% of the teams in that particular year. If you're not one of them, you need not apply.

Thanks Digger but that's BcS! Butler was a heck of a Team that earned its way into the Final Four with it's play on the court. Shelvin Mack and Gordon Hayward were great college players. The casual fan who wouldn't have watched the regular season anyway loves the tournament because of the Cinderella. Butler, VCU, George Mason, etc. all drive ratings and that creates advertising opportunities which drives revenue to the NCAA and participating schools. Take that away and go with the top 1% and you're going to end up with a fraction of the fan interest and the revenue that you have now.

You probably think that Boise St, TCU, Utah, etc. had no business sniffing around the national title in the last few years either.

NDSU was the best team in FCS last year. What if a couple of bounces had gone a different way and Georgia Southern had ended up 10-1 and #2. In your scenario, NDSU wouldn't have had the opportunity to play them, it would have been SHSU vs. GSU for the championship.

[youngterrier]

Honestly, I am of the opinion that a double or triple elimination tournament is the best way to determine a champion.

Granted, it's unrealistic for a physical sport like football, but with said tournament you make room for the "one mistake" sort of game while still giving the little guy a chance.

[JohnStOnge]

It's a step in the right direction but still a long way to go. To me, one characteristic of a good playoff system is that every school at the given level of competition controls its own destiny with respect to getting into the playoff tournament. So ideally every team would be in a conference and every conference champ would get an automatic bid.

I don't like selection committees who pick participants after the fact at all. To me, the right way to do it if you're going to have selection is the way the Louisiana High School Athletic Association (LHSAA) does its high school football playoffs. They have a power rating system. Everybody knows what it is. It's agreed upon before the season start. Everyone knows that when the dust settles the teams rated 1 through 32 in each class are going to be in the playoffs and be seeded according to those ratings. No "after the fact" opinions. And if they decide they don't like the way the power rating system works they can change it PRIOR to the next season. Human opinion plays a role, but only in the design of a system for measuring accomplishment BEFORE the first snap.

And that, to me, is the way it ought to be in ANY NCAA sport when it comes to at large selections. Every conference champ should get an automatic bid and at large bids ought to be awarded based on a power rating system selected prior to the start of the season. There should be no such thing as selection committees.

[JohnStOnge]

It's just the popular thing to say nowadays. People say they love the NCAA tournament, but it has killed their regular season...

I don't think the NCAA tournament per se killed the NCAA basketball regular season. What killed the basketball regular season is 1) overdoing it and letting too many at large teams in and 2) awarding automatic bids to conference tournament champs rather than regular season champs.

Think about what would happen if they said that there would only be 40 spots in the NCAA tournament and the regular season champ of each conference would get an automatic bid. There would be only 7 at large bids because there are 33 basketball conferences.

All of a sudden the regular season would become EXTREMELY important. No longer would even a team from the ACC be able to assume that it didn't have to win its regular season conference championship to get in. So all of a sudden the teams in the power conferences would see the need to win the conference as paramount.

And the teams from the small conferences would know that they absolutely HAD to win their regular season conference championships in order to get in.

In football, give every conference champ the automatic bid in a 20 team playoff and the regular season would be plenty important; even with the conference championship games. Ideally I'd like to see them get rid of conference championship games and just award automatic bids to regular season conference champs. But the conference championship games don't render the regular season moot because each team in each conference championship game still has to win a division. It's not like basketball is right now where you can finish 4th in your division of a conference and 8th overall in the regular season and still get into the NCAA tournament.

[SuperHornet]

Think about what would happen if they said that there would only be 40 spots in the NCAA tournament and the regular season champ of each conference would get an automatic bid. There would be only 7 at large bids because there are 33 basketball conferences.

All of a sudden the regular season would become EXTREMELY important. No longer would even a team from the ACC be able to assume that it didn't have to win its regular season conference championship to get in. So all of a sudden the teams in the power conferences would see the need to win the conference as paramount.

And the teams from the small conferences would know that they absolutely HAD to win their regular season conference championships in order to get in.

There's something to be said for this. But there are a few of issues. #1, it's hard to run a tournament, especially a BASKETBALL tournament, with a number of participants that is NOT a power of two. The brackets become goofy. #2, and the more practical one in the long run, is that such an idea would kill the conference tournaments. That strikes at the conference bottom line (read: $$), and for that reason alone, most conferences would put the kibosh on it REAL fast. Oh, I could see the Big Ten and the Pac-12 (long conference tournament holdouts) voting to reinstate the ban. But most see that as a cash cow that can't be sacrificed. Of course, for it to actually MAKE money, you have to do it right, and not every conference (read: the Big Sky) does. #3, you eliminate some of the drama factor by eliminating bogus teams from contention for the NCAAs. Yes, there's something to be said for that, but high drama in such a team getting hot at the right time (maybe they really ARE a decent team, but had a rash of injuries mid-season and are just now getting key players back off the shelf) leads to big ratings.

[SuperHornet]

In football, give every conference champ the automatic bid in a 20 team playoff and the regular season would be plenty important; even with the conference championship games. Ideally I'd like to see them get rid of conference championship games and just award automatic bids to regular season conference champs. But the conference championship games don't render the regular season moot because each team in each conference championship game still has to win a division. It's not like basketball is right now where you can finish 4th in your division of a conference and 8th overall in the regular season and still get into the NCAA tournament.

Again, 20 teams is a bit hard to deal with. I'd rather see either 16, 24, or 32. The brackets are smoother with those numbers. Twenty-four is not a power of two, true, but it's midway between two, so it's still a semi-decent bracket. Twenty leaves too many gaps in the first round.

The problem with conference championship games is that IOT have a true "conference champion" in a conference so big that not every team is on any given team's schedule, one must divide the conference and stage a game. It is too hard to break ties otherwise. Who wants to leave their auto-bid up to a coin toss?!? The other options would be to delete teams or to allow an auto-bid to the winner of each division. But THAT would not be fair to smaller conferences, who would only have ONE auto-bid while others would have two to four (depending on how far they split into divisions). And splitting into divisions is ALSO a problem, because when you get up to 14 to 16 teams, "divisions" of seven or eight teams are too unwieldy, IMO. I guess I'm spoiled by the NFL, which has historically had divisions of four or five teams.

I'm still an advocate of nine-team football leagues for that very reason. You get in your eight conference games with three OOC games, and everyone has played everyone, therefore the winner is the winner. And if there IS a tie, well, it's usually settled much earlier on the list of tiebreaker options than it would be in larger leagues where the tied teams may not have played each other.

[bluehenbillk]

You'll never see a large FBS playoff. Maybe 8 teams down the road but no more.

Three Reasons (2 are huge & 1 not as big):

1- MONEY - The power conferences are all about the money and aren't about to receive a lesser percentage of the pool than they do today. Moving from the bowl system to a 4-team playoff greatly increases the $$ pool for FBS postseason football. While everyone in the room will agree to the system b/c the $ they will receive will go up, the percentage disparity is just widening between the power conferences and everybody else.

2- Control - see #1. Make no mistake, there are 11 conferences plus Notre Dame in the room but there are 4 leagues running the show, they are not about to cede anything to leagues like CUSA, MAC, Sun Belt, etc... This isn't March Madness - the NCAA plays no part in this, the show is run by 4 leagues right now, and will be for the foreseeable future.

3- Length of season- With a 12 game schedule plus a conference championship game, with a 8-team playoff you're looking at a 16-game season - that's what the NFL plays. I've already heard people bitch about the extra game already, so don't think this thing will ever go out of control, especially for the 2 major reasons above.

[rkwittem]

Yet the peanut gallery still wants to comment anyway. If you don't watch or care, why comment?


(Unpopular opinion alert:)
Just for the record, I despise, loathe, and hate this move in every way possible. Basically, I hate playoffs. They seldom get the best teams from the regular season into the title game, even if their resume and body of work completely outclasses everyone else's.
The argument that "if they were the best team, they should have won" doesn't jive with me. If a 14 win NFL team loses to a 9 win team, does that mean the 9 win team is better? No. Only for that game. I think most people would agree that a team with 5 more wins than another is substantially better than the other.

Just give me #1 versus #2. For #3 on down, just match up the bowls so that they're great games. I don't care how, just do it. Eventually this monstrosity will grow and the regular season will become as relevant as college basketball's.

You've gotta be kidding with this nonsense. In what way is the FCS regular season irrelevant, when you need to win at LEAST 7 of 11 games to have a chance at playing for the national championship? How much more boring would baseball be if they played 162 games, and then just pitted the top teams from each league in a one-off championship?

The fact that roughly 1 in 6 teams make the playoffs is just too much. Why should a team that dominates a top conference have to win 3 more games to prove they're better than a 7-win team from a rival league? They already did- it was called the regular season. I can already someone whining about how unfair that is. Well too bad. Man up. Life's not fair and I don't believe in giving stuff to anyone unless they clearly earned it. When it comes to the BCS, the only team that really got jobbed was 2003 Auburn. That's it- they're the only ones who had a legitimate chance taken away from them. Someone had to get screwed- that's life.

Playoff are fine when they're exclusive. I'm just a hard-liner for the 4 isn't exclusive enough. Now they'll start hearing from teams that have no business contending for National Titles.
(And baseball did do that for a long time. And it still somehow managed to be popular. Of course, that was before interleague, so we knew that a team that owned the AL over 140 games was better than team #2 or team #3. The sample size was plenty big enough to say, 'alright, they're the best, put them in the World Series against the NL's best.' It worked.)

[rkwittem]

You've gotta be kidding with this nonsense. In what way is the FCS regular season irrelevant, when you need to win at LEAST 7 of 11 games to have a chance at playing for the national championship? How much more boring would baseball be if they played 162 games, and then just pitted the top teams from each league in a one-off championship?

I agree. I have two basic problems with saying you just pick the two best teams and let them play for the championship.

1) Professional leagues are much more homogeneous and it's a lot easier to judge teams because of consistent inter-division play. In college, it's a lot more difficult to judge teams from different conferences until you have the best of the best playing against each other in the playoffs.

2) Picking the 2 best teams isn't easy. In the BCS, there have been a number of circumstances when the choice of the 2nd best team has definitely been arguable. So the perceived 3rd best team is just screwed when that happens?
Stuart Mandel with SI did a pretty good job of comparing BCS reality to 4 team playoff ...

So when we total it up, a four-team playoff would have been more effective than the stand-alone title game 10 times in 14 years. That's certainly progress. But it's also true that the controversy won't fade. While there have been just three seasons (1999, 2002, 2005) in which the BCS title-game matchup was deemed universally satisfying, there were only four in which the four-team field was controversy free.

Read more: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2012/w ... z1yT3YUoPY" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

That's a good article and a fine case of offseason fodder. Good link. Here would be my counterarguments to your points:
1. Not really. It's basically a given that teams that win BCS conferences are usually better than teams that win midmajor conferences. Yes, there's always a Boise or Utah that wants to stick their craw in where it doesn't belong...but that's too bad. Someone's going to get screwed anyway and I'm nominating the little guys.

2. Yeah. Someone gets screwed. No one said life was fair. Hell, college football is only occasionally fair. If it was truly equitable, they wouldn't let Alabama schedule MAC teams and any FBS team would never schedule FCS teams. Upsets do happen, but putting a major program up against one it outclasses in every way isn't my idea of fair. And that's life. The BCS got 1 and 2 right most years. If you're #3, all I can is don't come crying to me. You should have taken care of business or done more. Sorry.

[UNI88]

I agree. I have two basic problems with saying you just pick the two best teams and let them play for the championship.

1) Professional leagues are much more homogeneous and it's a lot easier to judge teams because of consistent inter-division play. In college, it's a lot more difficult to judge teams from different conferences until you have the best of the best playing against each other in the playoffs.

2) Picking the 2 best teams isn't easy. In the BCS, there have been a number of circumstances when the choice of the 2nd best team has definitely been arguable. So the perceived 3rd best team is just screwed when that happens?
Stuart Mandel with SI did a pretty good job of comparing BCS reality to 4 team playoff ...

That's a good article and a fine case of offseason fodder. Good link. Here would be my counterarguments to your points:
1. Not really. It's basically a given that teams that win BCS conferences are usually better than teams that win midmajor conferences. Yes, there's always a Boise or Utah that wants to stick their craw in where it doesn't belong...but that's too bad. Someone's going to get screwed anyway and I'm nominating the little guys.

2. Yeah. Someone gets screwed. No one said life was fair. Hell, college football is only occasionally fair. If it was truly equitable, they wouldn't let Alabama schedule MAC teams and any FBS team would never schedule FCS teams. Upsets do happen, but putting a major program up against one it outclasses in every way isn't my idea of fair. And that's life. The BCS got 1 and 2 right most years. If you're #3, all I can is don't come crying to me. You should have taken care of business or done more. Sorry.

Stuart's points weren't really about BCS vs. mid-major conferences. The problem is that the level of play across conferences varies from year to year and there isn't enough inter-conference play to realistically be able to differentiate between 2 teams with the same record. In 2004, Auburn went 12-0 and was left out in favor of 12-0 USC and 12-0 Oklahoma. Were they clearly better than Auburn? In 2003, USC went 11-1 and was left out in favor of 12-1 Oklahoma and 12-1 LSU. Were they clearly better than USC? Picking the top 2 teams is subjective, even with a computer program with a pre-arranged set of logical instructions. Over the last 14 years, picking the top 4 teams for a playoff would have given better results 71.43% of the time. Picking the top 2 would have been better just 21.43% of the time.

You're right life isn't fair, I just want the best match-ups and the best championship game possible. I would have been much more interested last year if LSU had played Stanford and Alabama had played Oklahoma State (and you could have replaced Stanford with Oregon and reshuffled if you wanted).

You never answered my question about "What if a couple of bounces had gone a different way and Georgia Southern had ended up 10-1 and #2?" In a #1 vs. #2 only scenario, it would have been SHSU vs. GSU for the championship. This would have happened despite the fact that after the season it was clear that NDSU was the best team in FCS last year. That would have sucked for the Bison!

It is too difficult to accurately judge teams from different conferences with similar records to accurately pick the top 2 teams on a consistent basis. 4 teams is a good step for the BCS and I don't think it will expand as far as FCS, 8 teams is probably the max. It's different logistics when you're talking about trying to get tens of thousands of fans to travel to playoff games over multiple weekends (vs. a nice easy to plan for holiday to a bowl game)