re: College Football Playoff’s secret sauce will be ‘common sense’

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So you liked LSU jumping 5 spots over us in 2007?

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No one liked that, but UGA didn't deserve to win the national championship in 2007. If we did, we wouldn't have lost two games to inferior opponents. LSU did too, but luck was on their side. Them's the breaks.

The reason college football is special is that every regular season game means so much. Playoffs dilute that product, especially if you go beyond four teams.

ETA- If you think about it, college football has a whole fricking season of playoffs

Truth is unless and until we have some semblance of a playoff system like we have in basketball and baseball it will continue to be an exercise in searching for what is second best. And when you infuse the element of human judgement into the equation there will always be turmoil and debate.

Well besides who goes to the SECCG and who gets into the playoffs or has the higher seed. And not to mention bragging rights

Let's go ahead and add another term to the lexicon here.... Let's call it the "Atlanta-fication" of college football.

It's when something becomes a victim of it's own success. Which is where CFB is right now, imo.

Like the city of Atlanta, college football's unique spirit and success and culture and regional passion has attracted a lot of interest from outsiders. And like Atlanta, thanks to the massive outsider migration......college football is being diluted and is fast becoming unrecognizable from the beautiful thing it once was.

It's losing it's regional character. Hell, we have a fricking mid-western milk toast team in the SEC now! And Play-off zombies are mocking "traditionalists" right here on a fricking Georgia Sports board. Soon there will be NHL jersey-wearing fans in the student section, probably.

The Atlanta-fication of CFB is hard to watch. Sad....


(Side-note: keep an eye out on how long it takes deeprig to start using the term "Atlanta-fication". I'll give it 4 days tops, before he starts using it.)

If you don't like the AU/UGA example, think about our 2012 season.

We finished the season at 11-1. So did UF, but we beat them head to head and won the division and went to the SECCG. All is fine and dandy until we lose to Bama.

Then what does the committee do when they're choosing their four teams? Bama and ND are obviously in. Who goes between UF and UGA? We're now 11-2 and UF is 11-1 still. UF played a tougher schedule, which was by no means our fault. If the committee chooses UF, then the Cocktail Party doesn't matter. If they choose UGA, then the SECCG essentially doesn't matter. They have to choose one or the other, both teams would not have been bypassed.

The playoff system will erode these rivalries and will erode the conference championship games. And for what? So a few people who have no business arbitrarily choosing the best 4 teams in the country can do so? And this is supposed to be better than anything else we've had before?

College basketball is a terrible example since their huge tournament has served to completely devalue the regular season. The New Mexico bowl gets higher ratings than Duke vs. UNC.

The beauty of college football is the extremely dramatic regular season where every game matters. A 16 team playoff would take a lot of that away.

For all the whining towards the bcs there were maybe three years of the 16 we had it where there was big controversy over who got in the title game.

So how does that make the BCS better? The BCS is essentialy a two team playoff. What's so bad about giving more teams a chance?

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Do the playoffs really work everywhere else or are they just generally accepted?

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No they work it's not 100% but sure as hell better then any other method

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Then what does the committee do when they're choosing their four teams? Bama and ND are obviously in. Who goes between UF and UGA? We're now 11-2 and UF is 11-1 still. UF played a tougher schedule, which was by no means our fault. If the committee chooses UF, then the Cocktail Party doesn't matter. If they choose UGA, then the SECCG essentially doesn't matter. They have to choose one or the other, both teams would not have been bypassed.

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You guys are trying to invent issues here. They said they'll go with common sense and that would imply that UGA would have been the one included.

Trying to say that UF would have gone over us is looking at the situation from anything but a common sense point of view.

UF played a tougher schedule sure, but they lost head-to-head which should almost always take precedence over strength of schedule. If the committee chooses UF, the WLOCP doesn't matter, the SECCG doesn't matter, and the fact we won head-up doesn't matter. I don't understand your reasoning saying that sending UGA makes the SECCG not matter, on the contrary sending us is exactly what would have made it matter. Are you seriously suggesting that we should have been punished and held out in lieu of a team we beat because we actually made it to the title game and lost by 5 yards while they sat at home and watched it on TV because Malcom Mitchell is a beast? The only time making the title game should hurt you is in a UT '07 or USC '10 situation when you back in and then get your shite pushed in when you get there. '11 is another prime example of when the SECCG loser would be jumped. '12 is a perfect example of when it would be laughable to jump them.

Also, we would have been in in 2007 if there were a human committee to make the call. Everyone with eyes that isn't an LSU fan knows we were one of the top 2 teams in the country that season by the end of it. Probably would have been #4, but at least the teams that deserved a shot would have all gotten it in LSU, UGA and USC. OSU would have been the easy-out. If you want to argue those two early losses made us undeserving, I'd argue that there was not a deserving champion that year at all then.

The only argument that the BCS is better is that at least it doesn't diminish the regular season. On the other hand, a playoff diminishes the regular season. What do we get in return? 2 more teams w/ an opportunity to win? We get an extra 2 games?

If they're going to do it, then they need to break it down to the point where there are 4 major conferences w/ 8 divisions. Or 8 major conferences w/ 16 divisions, whichever is your cup of tea, but 4 and 8 sounds better to me. If you win your division then you get a spot in the playoffs. Nobody else does. Every conference has a conference championship game if conferences still prefer that model and that helps to determine seeding. That trims the fat out of FBS (Georgia Southern, Troy, etc), provides a playoff system, and doesn't diminish the regular season to a crazy extent. It also makes Notre Dame's sorry arse get in a conference - because if you're not in a conference and don't win your division, then you aren't eligible for the playoffs.

That sounds great to me. SEC or at least the southeast US gets 2 reps. Weak, but I could possibly deal with it.

Why won't this model work? Why will that never happen?

(1) The amount of lawsuits that teams/schools/conferences would face when the fat is trimmed and realignment occurs would be ungodly. We wouldn't even be playing football anymore, lawyers would have a field day.

(2) Geography. I like the idea of uniformity across the country and winning a division to qualify for the playoffs...but there is no such thing as uniformity across the country. Why should the Southeast get the same amount of teams as the Northeast or Midwest? Why should the Southeast have to play a bloodbath of a regular season while others don't.

(3) Rivalries. You would be cutting out the heart of college football. This would never happen.

(4) College football cannot be the NFL. It wants to be, but it can't be. You recruit, you don't draft players. There will always be an inherent advantage for those schools/regions that are closer to the talent.



My only true point being: This 4 team playoff is about to hurt the SEC, not help it. It was not designed to help the SEC. It also isn't going to do much for college football unless you're talking $$$. But, I'm never going to see any of that $$$, so I don't care. It's going to expand and expand and expand until the all the great rivalry games no longer matter. The more it expands, the more arbitrary the selection process becomes. The more it caters to television sets, to the audience, etc.




That's JMO and that's how I would set up college football if it was at all feasible, but it's not and never will be. We'll see how it plays out and I hope I'm wrong.