If every other sport has a playoff…

Pat Forde thinks that Stony Brook’s off-the-wall appearance in this year’s College World Series should be an inspiration to the suits planning the new football postseason.

Quite simply, Forde wants Cinderella to go to the ball.

But a four-team deal certainly presents no opportunity to the Stony Brooks of college football. The champions of the Sun Belt, Mid-American Conference, Conference USA and Western Athletic Conference (should it survive) never will make that cut. The Mountain West and even the Big East would be long shots.

Football, greedy and decentralized, doesn’t care.

Meanwhile, the rest of college sports give the little guys a chance to do it on the field. It gives life to the overachiever stories that are a large part of what makes sports compelling.

Yeah, that’s been college football’s big problem.  It hasn’t been compelling enough without Troy in a playoff.

From there, it’s a course in Wetzellian regular season “integrity”.

There are 11 conferences. Take the champions of each and add one at-large team. You don’t think that would still put a premium on the regular season? That wouldn’t make winning a conference championship important?

A selection committee chooses the at-large teams and seeds the field. The top four seeds get a first-round bye. Seeds 9-12 play on the road against seeds 5-8 in the first round, then the top four hosts the winners of those games in quarterfinals.

Say you end up with No. 12 seed Florida International at No. 5 Michigan in the first round. And say FIU wins. The impact would be Stony Brook on steroids.

I’m not sure why it’s so hard to understand why that wouldn’t be the case, but let me add one more thing here, since Forde brought up college baseball.  Stony Brook may have been perceived as a long shot because of where it’s located and because it played a weak schedule, but it had to earn a spot in Omaha by grinding through two rounds of double-elimination play.  That’s not going to happen in a single-elimination football tourney.

Not that Forde is bothered by the distinction.  In fact, if anything, he’d prefer to enhance it.

It would take four weekends to play the tournament, five if you give the final twosome two weeks to rest and prepare, like the NFL. If that’s too long for the coaches and academicians to handle, there is a solution. Dump conference championship games and free up the first weekend of December.

I’ll never understand how all these people who profess their undying love for college football are so eager to undo its uniqueness.  But at least we’ll get brackets!

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Micromanaging in Richt’s new contract

Marc Weiszer goes through Mark Richt’s new contract and makes a nice catch with this:

Here is some new language that wasn’t in the previous contract:

–“It is expected that the recruitment of junior college student-athletes will be kept to a minimum, as determined by Richt and the Athletic Director.”

As Weiszer notes, it’s not as if Richt invests a lot of scholarships in JUCO transfers, so this is more of a non-issue issue perhaps.  Still, I bet Nick Saban doesn’t have time for that shit in his contract.  I wonder how prevalent that provision is across the SEC.  And who in Athens was bothered enough by this to insist on adding the provision to Richt’s new deal.

Vegas digs Georgia’s schedule.

The Golden Nugget is posting odds on 111 college football games today.  You can see the list here (h/t Kegs ‘N Eggs).  Georgia appears in five of those games and is the favorite in all of them, including South Carolina (favored by 2.5) and Florida (favored by 4.5).

By the way, I love this note:  “You’ll also see more Pac-12 games on the board because of the frequent visitors Las Vegas gets from neighbor state California.”  Check out the spreads listed for Southern Cal and you’ll see how frequent Vegas thinks its California visitors are.

The one part of SEC expansion I don’t mind.

Okay, okay, so I’m not exactly thrilled with the latest round of SEC expansion.  But Missouri and TAMU folks, please understand – it’s not about you.  In fact, I admit there’s something coming that absolutely intrigues me, and that’s the bit about how your teams’ offenses are going to fare in the rough and tumble of a conference known for its defensive prowess.

David Paschall has a good introduction to this here.  As he put it in his introduction,

Missouri and Texas A&M finished last year ranked among the top dozen college football teams in total offense.

Now they’re in the Southeastern Conference, a league renowned for stingy defense. After all, Alabama and LSU played each other for eight quarters last season before an official signaled a touchdown.

Culture clash!

We may get some answers to the debate on whether it’s the Big 12 defenses that make the Big 12 offenses so potent and vice versa as to the SEC.  I’m looking forward to that.  One thing’s for sure, and that’s in this regard, at least, that this expansion is very different from the one in 1992:

Bracing for potent offenses was hardly a concern during the SEC’s last expansion in 1992, when Arkansas and South Carolina arrived and averaged 16 and 15 points per game. The new Tigers and Aggies certainly would ensure successful debuts by compiling offensive numbers anywhere close to what they did a year ago.

When I grow up, Dad, I wanna be just like you.

Steve Spurrier Jr. proves that in some ways the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.