re: If you can't win your division or conference, you can't be "National" Champion

This is why we need 8 teams. It's the best of both worlds: 5 teams who won it on the field, and 3 wild-cards, for a lack of a better word. If one of the potential wild cards feel they got left out, you can simply say "hey, you should've won the conference then".

Not sure why there's pushback for 8 teams. Some people have said 8 teams dilutes things....really? A #1 vs #8 matchup in the regular season has always been a big deal, so why wouldn't it be in a playoff?

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I've maintained this position for 20 years. I still think it is true.

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Still crazy after all these years.

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The best teams should play for a NC. Just because one team happened to lose one game to someone in conference doesn't mean they're not better than a team that lost two or three games, but won their conference.

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And just because another team lost 2 or 3 games doesn't mean they are worse than a team that didn't play anyone and lost the one game they played against a top team.

Sure you can. You can have one bad game and still be the best team. I mean, if you are going to eliminate one team because they lost one game, then you have to eliminate all teams that lost a game.


I am not making a case that Alabama should go to the playoffs, or are the best team. Just trying to explain why I think your premise is flawed.

Ill be sure to let Notre Dame know

At the end of the day, the OP’s argument isn’t the most unreasonable thing you’ll read on the rant today, but it’s a strawman based on his emotions and personal opinions, not the reality of the system we have. The blatant lying about past Saban quotes aside, he is simply trying to redefine what constitutes a national championship into something that he personally finds more palatable than the system we all agreed to play under.

This is no different from the abundance of Auburn fans on here who like to lampoon some of Bama’s championships on one hand which they don’t think are ‘fair’ for one reason or the other, while redefining what constitutes an NC in the other hand to allow them to claim titles in other random years in which they didn’t get one (’04, ’93, 83’). I know the word ‘snowflake’ is thrown around too much these days, but that is what is happening here. In short, your personal opinion doesn’t matter in the real world. No one cares what you think is fair. Read the selection committee's guidelines if you want to know what allows a team to become the National Champion.

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if TCU loses then Alabama is in.

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Not sure I see the correlation. I mean, that means Oklahoma would be in. The winner of Clemson/Miami, winner of SEC, and probably Wisconsin or OSU.

Why would a TCU loss affect that?

Been there done that

21-0

Sure let’s limit the selection committee’s pool of candidates to at most 6 teams. Usually there would only be 5 depending on what Notre Dame does in the given year. You morons realize that under this criteria, if Florida had beaten Bama last year that the entire playoff pool would have been decided by Florida

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AlaTiger
If you can't win your division or conference, you can't be "National" Champion
It's really simple. I don't care if you're 11-1 and everyone else in the country has 2-3 losses. If you can't win your division or conference, how can you claim a "National" championship?

Allowing this makes the regular season and conferences meaningless. It deconstructs the very essence of college football and allows teams to back in, making all we saw before meaningless.

Saban changes his mind on this based on what benefits him. But, unless you go to an 8 team playoff and have all of the conference champions and multiple at-large teams, having teams who didn't win their division or conference when they had a chance, is a farce.

And, in this particular case, the SEC is a mess and had a terrible year. If you can't even win your division or conference in the SEC in 2017, then you have no claim on a national title nor should you play for it.

I've maintained this position for 20 years. I still think it is true.

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Just because you've maintained this position for 20 years does not mean that 1) your logic holds, or 2) that it is true at all.

If you don't win your division, it means that you can't play for or win your conference championship. And the primary qualifying condition to claim the "national" championship is to win the four team playoff, not by winning your conference championship. As much as you want them to be, they are not strictly related. The FBS committee is free to chose whoever they feel are the best four teams in the country.

Right now, having a conference championship is NOT a qualifying factor for inclusion into the four team FBS playoff. Would it help? Of course. Is it necessary? Of course not. This is irrespective of whether you are an Alabama, Auburn, TCU, Ohio St, of whatever fan.

To quote Ben Shapiro, "The facts don't care about your feelings."