Roy Kramer has not come to bury the BCS, but to praise it. And you know what? It’s hard to argue with what he has to say about it.
Plus, you have to chuckle at this back-handed epitaph:
Florida State and Auburn were the clear-cut choices to play in this season’s BCS title finale after Ohio State got upset last Saturday in the Big Ten championship game. A four-team playoff will debut next season, which would have been very difficult to determine had it arrived a year early.
Alabama, the SEC West runner-up to Auburn, is third in the polls, and a fourth team would have been selected among Big Ten champion Michigan State, Big 12 champion Baylor and Pac-12 champion Stanford.
“You talk about controversy,” Kramer said. “You tell me who that fourth team is. I’m not going to have to worry about that one.”
I don’t know about you, but I’m looking forward to the interview with whomever says the last rites over the eight-team playoff.
Get The Picture 
They have said they’ll give precedence to conference champs, which I’m hopeful for. I’d take fsu, auburn, mich st, and Baylor. Sorry, if you’ve got the same record as a conference champ, the champ goes. It’s so easy but they don’t seem to know or how to figure it out. A few things need to happen:
-mandate the big 12 to get 2 more teams and have a champ game
-mandate 10 games per year vs bcs teams. You can go 8 conf and 2 OOC or 9 & 1. That still gives you 2 breathers. The problem is some teams have 4 breathers and it’s hard to compare records then.
I’m most worried, and this sounds arrogant, that the people running the show just aren’t smart enough to figure it out. I actually think a 6 team playoff could be the best. 5 conf champions and 1 at large. 1 & 2 get byes. 6 plays at 3, 5 plays at 4. The lowest seed advances to play at 1, the highest advances to play at 2. The 4 losers of those first 2 rounds advance to play each other in bcs bowls. The semi winners play for all the marbles.
-rewards conf champs
-allows for 1 wild-card
-if you’re the wildcard, you’re gonna have to win 2 on the road
-extremely rewards and elite or undefeated season
-rewards the kids with a fun bowl experience if they lose. They’re one of the top 6 teams in the u.s., they deserve a bowl
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None of that matters as much as revenue generation. The problem with the people running the show isn’t their intelligence. It’s their level of greed.
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You’ll probably be frequently repeating that comment. Every time somebody like Sugardaddy comes up with a well thought out idea, based on merits of competition, it takes me time to remember that they’ll keep stretching the playoffs until the marginal profit is gone. That is all.
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Ain’t that the truth! Greed is greed….The lowest level of greed will bring you down eventually.
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True
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Six would be the perfect number if it didn’t require Byes, and I consider that significant. Six provides inclusion for the conference champs, a must, but it doesn’t provide a level playing field for the entrants. Eight works to insure another tough game for everyone involved, and it gives two more games to feed the greed factor.
The committee should announce extra points for anyone facing, and winning, an extra high-level game for thre championship of it’s conference. That would encourage the Big 12 and ND to get their act together. After a few years of being left out they will get the idea. And why wait to expand the playoffs to include conference champs when we know four is wrong? Change the half ass solution before it begins.
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6 is the perfect # because it creates byes.
In a 4 team or larger playoff the Big10CG would not have mattered to most SEC fans because they will get a spot in the playoff. In a 6 team playoff a bye is on the line. Further, it creates incentive to schedule decent OOC games.
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I agree. I like the 6 team format best. The sweet spot range is 4-8.
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8 team playoff can’t get here fast enough
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It won’t be staying long, either.
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16-team playoff, coming soon to a profit margin near you, with a Christmas day Elite 8 (or a national title game after NSD; pick your poison).
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ugh.. the magic of the best and only regular season worth watching destroyed.
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You don’t know what you got til it’s gone…….If Alabama gets in the playoffs every year regardless of how many big games they choke on I’m against it.How many times did the BCS get it wrong twice? If the new system were already in place it would start off with the wrong choice of facilitating a potential rematch it’s first year.I didn’t like the Alabama/LSU rematch as a title game and I would not like a Auburn/Alabama rematch either because it devalues all the fall games and means the regular season is no longer the continuous playoff we love.. So we’re all correct the powers that be know that they’re ruining the regular season games but they see more money/revenue in the chaos they are creating. If I wanted play-offs I’d watch pro football instead of NCAA. I hate watching slow motion train wrecks it reminds me of Obamacare.
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You are learning me somthing….J
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At some point I wish somebody would stand up and draw a line in the sand and say that if you are the # whatever team in the country, you are not #1 worthy and we are not going to let you compete for the title. The biggest problem I have with the playoff system is that you always get the next guy saying that he deserves a shot. If we have a 4 team playoff, then #5 is complaining. Look at basketball. You have 65 teams and #66 is complaining.
The BCS isn’t perfect, but I think it at least gets the top teams right. In my opinion, the #10 ranked BCS team will lose to the #1 ranked team almost 100% of the time. They get it pretty right. You can argue that #2 really should be #1, and #5 should really be #3 etc… But at some point, #6 or #7 (or whatever) has no claim to the title.
I am interested to see if a 4 team playoff can be a good compromise, but beyond that, it’s just stupid. I wish somebody of influence would make the case to not go down this slippery slope. But alas…the money will carry us there.
Oh, and…before anybody starts, F*%# Cinderella teams. They never win the title.
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“Oh, and…before anybody starts, F*%# Cinderella teams. They never win the title.”
The 8 – 8 NY Giants are on the phone for you…
…Auburn is holding on line 2. Boise St. left a message.
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Did I miss something? When did Boise State win a national title? When can you consider Auburn a Cinderella team? What tournament was that in?
I will give you the 8-8 NYG, but show me the NCAA basketball team that won the title. Lowest seed to ever win in basketball was the #8 – and I think only once. So why waste time with a play in game to determine the 64th team invited? And they have been talking about 64 teams not being enough?!?
By your logic, just cancel the regular season and only have a massive playoff.
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I hate Auburn so much, I’m considering them a Cinderella team this year, just based on lucky breaks. And in a 4 team playoff format in prior years, would not BSU have been considered a Cinderella? And give they beat OU, maybe even won? I’m totally against the playoffs…I think a Cinderella may win and not sure I’ll like that (unless it’s UGA, of course!).
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That Oklahoma team had two losses and would not have been in any 4 team playoff format. And even then Boise needed Auburn type luck to win.
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Cinderella teams can win games…but rarely can they close the deal. I think BS beat an over rated OU team that didn’t take them seriously. If that had been a playoff year, the next team that they would have played would have beat them. Just my opinion…we’ll never know.
Basketball history has taught us that the occasional George Mason run makes for a fun little stretch, but it’s soon midnight.
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The NY Giants never won a Superbowl with an 8-8 record.
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You are correct sir…They were 9 – 7.
’78 Washington Bullets won the NBA with a 44 – 38 regular season record.
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“At some point I wish somebody would stand up and draw a line in the sand and say that if you are the # whatever team in the country, you are not #1 worthy and we are not going to let you compete for the title”
This. The point of a playoff is to determine the #1 team in the nation. If you have a loss then it’s your own fault if you get left out. The only issue I have is with undefeated teams getting left out and I think 4 spots fixes the issue.
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Not for the people running the show. Never has been the case in American sports leagues.
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One things for sure, fans like us will be left out of personally attending games in a 4, 6, 8 or 16 team playoff. You will have to be rich to handle the short notice logistics and ticket costs and the playoffs will turn into the NFL without the home fields. Of course that will drive up the TV demand and market. If UGA ever wins another NC we won’t be there like NO on 1/1/81.
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But there will be more “meaningful” games to watch over the holidays!!! The wind is blowing, man…get on board with the new and improved world!!
Will the Redcoat band even get to travel to the first round?
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And by contrast, there will be many more less meaningful games in the months prior to the holidays.
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I accept change but will only be on board if I don’t get left out! Would rather die than watch on TV.
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Just curious Senator, were you this concerned when they went from no playoff to a 2 team playoff in 1998? That’s what the BCS is, a 2 team playoff.
The playoff isn’t starting now. It’s expanding now. It started 15 years ago.
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Nope, there’s still only 1 post-season game. The change represents the expansion of post-season games to, for at least 2 teams, 2 games. I’m sure he and others saw the playoff coming back then, since iirc it was talked about. Other sports’ playoffs, and the FCS playoff, have been talked about for a while, and were talked about in the original BCS conversation.
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I know there’s only 1 postseason game. That’s why I said “2 team playoff”.
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I wasn’t because all they did was rejigger the existing bowl system a bit to force a 1 vs. 2 game. What’s coming now is a much bigger sea change and it gets much easier to expand than the old one. Put it this way: it won’t take ’em another fifteen years to add the next round of playoffs.
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I tend to agree that it won’t take another 15 years to expand again. Good, old fashioned capitalism will provide plenty of impetus for change.
I look at it like this – it all started with the implementation of the Bowl Coalition back in 1992. That laid the ground work for the BCS in 1998. And the BCS laid the ground work for the playoff in 2014.
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I think you are right, and it shouldn’t take as long to rectify this mistake as it did the first one. But I do think an expansion to 16, or more, will face strong resistance due to lack of strong supporting rationale for teams being slighted, and logistics. Be worth a bet on the O/U on years with a bottle of Macallan against bottle of Woodford. But have to get past this stubborn, first obstacle before that can happen.
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Your faith in our college football overlords’ decency is touching. Misguided, but touching.
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Mac is just thinking they think like he does. No integrity there though.
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This is the way to go: The big schools need to realign into 4 super-conferences each with 2 divisions. At the end of the season each division champ then will play the other for the championship of each conference. Then the champions of each conference will have a 4 team playoff. That is a de facto 8 team playoff. The only things lost by this arrangement is that 2 teams from the same conference can’t be in the 4 team playoff and you run the risk of 2 very good teams being in the same division and 1 gets eliminated early. Sorry Bama, you actually will have to win the SECCG to get in instead of relying on reputation.
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Look, this isn’t hard. You settle on the 4th team by having a play off among the 4 teams ranked after the top 3. And you add a proviso that if it’s unclear who should fill the coveted 7th slot, you have a 4 team play off for that, and so on. That way, we’d only have a couple of weeks without college football before the spring scrimmage games. ESPN, be aware that this idea is proprietary intellectual property; but, don’t worry, I’m not greedy–2% of gross will do fine.
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This is why a 4 team playoff solves nothing. Need 8. I think arguing about who is 8th is much less important than who is 4th.
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just like arguing about who is second is much less important than who is 2nd.
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