re: I miss poll era football.

quote:

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Any system that ends with none of the championship-level teams actually playing each other and a bunch of newspaper writers “voting” on who is the champion is just plain stupid.

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How is that any different from the system we have now? Yeah...the system we have at present is more efficient at awarding a national champion, but there's still a vote at the end of the season as to who the best teams are. In the Poll Era, the media would vote on the best team; in the BCS era, the media would vote on the two best teams; and in the Playoff era, a group of people is now voting on the four best teams.

And now there's an added dimension to the debate with the advent of the BCS and Playoff eras: best vs. most deserving team. Can you be one of the best teams in college football if you failed to win your conference? At the end of the day, there's still subjectivity to it. Which is why a lot of people such as the OP miss the old days when things were a little more dynamic.

The Rose Bowl, Sugar Bowl, Orange Bowl, and Cotton Bowl used to all mean something and used to all be played on the exact same day (January 1). Each one of those games had potential national title implications. Yeah...it's true #1 vs. #2 rarely collided in those match-ups, but did that really matter considering how subjective those rankings were to begin with? Almost all of those games were match-ups between Top 5/10 teams. So either way, you were getting a high-stakes game between two teams that were very good.