Nothing like overplaying your rhetorical hand there, Bill Hancock. No conference commissioner has ever uttered anything that stupid.
Warts and all, the BCS title game is a playoff, last time I checked. And Mike Slive doesn’t seem to be too worried about the negative impact of a plus-one game.
Ladies and gentlemen, the BCS/playoffs debate, where none of the public players deserve our sympathy.
Get The Picture 
Drama always makes good policy.
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http://yhoo.it/he8CzH
Baseball notebook: Selig anticipates playoff expansion
The Sports Xchange
Apr 21, 8:15 pm EDT
Commissioner Bud Selig expects the Major League Baseball playoffs to expand from eight teams to 10 for the 2012 season, he said Thursday.
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Regarding the playoffs, Selig had expressed his support for an expanded playoffs last fall, although the matter is subject to collective bargaining with the players’ association.
“I would say we’re moving to expanding the playoffs, but there’s a myriad of details to work out,” Selig told the Associated Press sports editors. “Ten is a fair number.”
Selig said the plan would be to add a wild-card team in each league. The two wild cards in each league would meet in a preliminary round, and the winners would advance to the following round against division winners.
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Playoff expansion is like death and taxes.
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Or as we used to say, “…death, taxes, and Patrick Pass running out of bounds 1 yard short of the first down….”
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“10 is a fair number.” Discuss….
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If by “fair” you mean “generates more income”, it makes sense.
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Fast forward 5-10 years, and I bet 12 teams will seem much more fair…….
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Perhaps he meant “fare.”
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One thing I don’t understand: In any playoff scenario, those advocates always seem to go with conference champions. I think this sounds like an easy solution to picking a team…but nothing will cut into the meaning of the regular season more. (Yes a playoff will reduce it also…not my point.) Out of Conf games will be absolutely meaningless. A 7-5 team can trump an 11-1 team for a shot at the National Title. It’s not just about “not good enough to win your own conf”–Stupid Tie-breakers will rule. Unlike other sports, there are just not enough conference games to make every Conf. Champ the best team.
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Uhh…conference championship games are already de-facto playoffs…with the loser and any non participant (see UGA 2007) being cast off as unworthy of the game also known as the National Championship game.
Its a simple argument…either you want an objective champion or you want a subjective champion. There are pros and cons of both…if you care about preserving the ‘regular season’ at all costs and who the ‘best’ team is, then you probably want to preserve the status quo….a playoff MIGHT result in a hit to both of those. I’m a person that likes the game to be decided on the field rather than in the papers, thus, I’m a scrap the current system and go to a true playoff guy.
I’m pretty sure that our opinions don’t really matter. I would say that what matters are two things: control and money. Those are the forces that are going to continue to drive college football’s postseason…I’m resigned to the fact that arguing the merits of one system over the other is academic at this point.
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Oklahoma and Nebraska each played in a BCSNC Game without winning its conference championship. Both lost the BCSNC game, however either one could have won. There is no rule that says a team has to win its conference to be allowed to play in the BCSNC Game. In fact, the year that tOSU and Michigan were being touted as both being soooo deserving of a slot in the Big Game tOSU had beaten Michigan in the regular season. But Kirk Herbstreit and his ESPN cronies were doing a sales job on the country about those 2 being the “2 best teams” but they just happened to be in the same conference. Florida exposed that to be a load of BS by stomping tOSU . ESPN only trots out that “got to win its own conference” BS when UGA is being considered. See 2007.
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Well…to a point, there really isn’t any rule on who can and can’t play in the championship game. The voters are able to vote for whoever they want.
And yes, you are right about Oklahoma and Nebraska…but that was 8 years ago and the BCS formula was changed partly to prevent that from happening in the future after Oregon and USC missed the national championship games that season. (of course, the formula was changed to give voters more power over the process b/c they know sooooo much more than the computers..i digress) And you’re also right about Herbie, but I think what you saw after that whole “Michigan should be in” mess was that people generally punted that argument…there were 0 people arguing for Georgia in 2007 thanks to Florida in 2006 justifying all of the people who said you have to win the conference championship to play in the game…(i hate Florida). I don’t think it was a Georgia bias. I think the dynamic in 2006 changed to the point where the conventional wisdom going forward is to play for a national championship, you must win your conference championship…
Of course, all that is grasping at straws b/c there really aren’t any rules. Voters in the polls control the process through their opinions. They realized a long time ago that they could make money by ‘ranking’ the teams and I doubt you’ll ever hear a college football writer who depends on rankings as part of their relevance abdicate giving back that power or money.
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A +1 playoff would be perfect. It fixes the “third and fourth team with an argument” problem without harming the regular season or the rest of the bowls at all. The fifth team has no argument and the fourth team should feel lucky you can’t have a playoff with 3 teams.
Whatever specific version Phil Steele presented in his preview magazine last year was awesome. I hope he puts that thing verbatim in the next one.
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HK. + 1. .. I agree.. A +1 playoff would be perfect.
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Ahh, the 5th team may not have an argument that they should be #1, but they’ll certainly have an argument that they should be #4! And if #4 has an argument that they should be included, and #5 has an argument that they should be #4, they should be included…. I’m going to take an Advil.
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The 9th team has an argument that it should be 8th, the 13th team has an argument that it should be 12th, the 17th has an argument that it should be 16th, and on and on. Wherever you draw the line the next team will complain that it was wrongfully left out. A playoff using the top 4 captures the best team more than 90% of the time. Plus it doesn’t blow up the present bowl structure.
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Is it perfect, though? In 2009, you had five perfect record teams: Alabama, Texas, Cincinnati, Boise State, and TCU … plus Florida, whose only loss was to Alabama which gives them a case as being better than some of the other undefeated teams (which they would prove against Cincinnati). So naturally, there would have been an outcry at that point to expand the playoff to eight. But then you have a bunch of one loss teams left out, except that season, when there was a gap and it would have to be two and three loss teams, so you get a glut of Penn State, Iowa, Pitt, Central Michigan, etc.
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