I’m not even going to check before I make this assertion: Get The Picture* has seized on last night’s national championship game-type substance as an opportunity to tweak college football playoff advocates. Come on, baby…
Dammit.
As I mentioned the other day, I’ve come to terms with March Madness. It’s not about matching the best teams in a national title game (although Brian makes a pretty convincing argument that in most years the tourney does a pretty good job matching quality opponents in the title game); it’s about the spectacle of Cinderella. As long as nobody suggests it’s a good template for college football, I’m cool with that.
But there’s one thing about Brian’s argument that gets me: the stronger you make the case that you’ve got deserving teams facing off for the national title (90% of the time, per Brian), the stronger you make the case that you’ve got way too big a tournament if having the best face off is the goal, right? If the cream tends to rise to the top, there doesn’t seem to be much reason for a 13-seed to take the floor.
Of course, if generating maximum TV revenues and saving mediocre coaches’ asses by adding postseason appearances to their resumes are your goals, then the system is darn near perfect.
Get The Picture 
To be honest, I thought the same exact thing as I turned off the game halfway through the 2nd half.
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LOL.
Same here.
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Me three.
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I like how he skipped over GT’s 2004 championship game appearance (and loss).
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I like how he skipped over the bull-dregs’ last appearance in the championship game. Now, when was that exactly?
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Was I the only person watching the game thinking “Wow, are they trying to out-point shave each other??”
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THE SLIPPER STILL FITS!!!!!!!
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I think the key to March Madness is that it emphasizes BAD losses as opposed to just any loss. It’s widely accepted in basketball that a bad loss or two may not take you out of the running but in football, any loss can cost you a shot at the title.
In basketball, winning your conference is largely irrelevant. In fact, most pundits agree that an early exit from a conference tourney means extra days for much needed rest, so it helps the top teams anyway.
Whoever argues that the two can even relate to one another is either oblivious to the key differences in the sport or are just grasping at straws trying to further their playoff agenda.
A large number of undefeated teams in football will do 10x more for a football playoff argument than a cinderella winning the tournament any day.
For those who want a playoff, I suggest they ask teams like Boise not to lose to teams like Nevada when it counts….
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If your ultimate goal is to pit the two best teams against each other, for football it makes sense to have a playoff no larger than six teams. There are roughly three times more I-A basketball teams and 68 (don’t even get me started about 96) is still way too large a field. You can’t seriously argue that about 20% of the teams in college basketball deserve their shot at a title (however remote those chances might be).
I’d also like to add, because I see this argument all the time, that college football does have a championship that is decided on the field. The playoff proponents who make this argument simply have a problem with the selection criteria, which is an entirely separate argument.
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The World Series produces the only true “National Championship.”
By the time Major League Baseball teams slug through a 162 game regular season with division foes playing substantially similar strength-of-schedule, the playoffs, and the leauge championship series, the two teams competing in the best of seven World Series are clearly the two that deserve to be there.
Every MLB team has 162 chances to show that it deserves to play post-season. Every MLB team that makes it to post-season has a best of five and best of seven chance to advance.
The World Series model simply will not work for college football or college basketball. NCAA ball has too many teams playing too dissimilar schedules to produce certitude like the World Series does.
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I kind of disagree with this on the premise that many years the Braves were the best “regular season” team but were eliminated in the NLDS. In a short 5 game series you can ride two dominant pitchers (i.e. the 2001 D’backs with Schilling/Johnson) and get two starts out of each to win the series. In a 7 game series you only need one decent outing from a #3 to win the series. I would argue that the STL Cardinals team that won 84 regular season games a few years ago and then caught fire in the playoffs were not the best team in baseball.
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I understand where you’re coming from, and maybe the best of five series ought to be replaced with best of seven (though we lost to the Diamonbacks in the NLCS one game to four in 2001 so we did have plenty of chances to progress to the World Series).
But, we wouldn’t listen much to other teams’ fans complaining about riding two (or four) dominant pitchers when ours were named Maddux, Glavine, Avery, and Smoltz.
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I disagree about the Braves being the best team during the regular season for most of their run, they simply had the best record. Given the disparity between schedules in the two leagues, plus the division games’ over-weighting, then add the inter-league “lottery” like pairings and you cannot use the records to prove that point. There is also the timing of when you catch teams and could avaid facing their best pitching rotation.
I always felt the Braves’ downfall was Cox ran the team for winning the regular season. They faltered when they faced top notch pitching and couldn’t play “little ball” by advancing/pushing runners along. Seemed to lose a lot of the 2-1, 4-3 type games as they played for the big inning with HRs bailing them out. I have never seen another team where 2-3 players in their lineup were never required to sacrifice bunt all season. Insanity! I believe there were years where the Braves won the division but had a losing record against teams/pitchers with winning records. Don’t recall exactly when, but remember some analyst digging that up.
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Sorry, “Braves’ downfall” and “Cox” do not compute for me.
I suffered through so many seasons of fifth and sixth place finishes in the old NL West. Ron Reed, Tony Cloninger, Milt Pappas, Claude Raymond. Taking a three-run lead into the ninth and then losing by four. Yikes!
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Get Excited For March Madness 2012: http://t.co/GWi
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A Cinderella team would NEVER win a college football playoff. Can a Cinderella team win one game. See App. State. over Michigan. Could they win 3 or 4 games in a playoff. HELL NO!!!.
Those people that compare basketball to football in their playoff arguments are idiots. Another thing about basketball, put Butler in the SEC or Big East and they very well may be a 4 seed. I really shouldn’t have to explain the differences to anybody as to why that might be the case. I also don’t believe Boise could win 3 games in a football playoff either. It just doesn’t take as many quality athletes to win basketball games, DUH. Butler has done it 2 years in a row now and easily could have won last years title. Time to take off their glass slippers.
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