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Robbie Marriage's avatar

People all around are saying that this was the best possible season for the introduction of the 12 team playoff. I entirely disagree. I don't think many seasons in the sport's history could've exposed the 12 team playoff worse than this one. Looking back through college football history reveals that most of the time a three loss team wriggles its way into the top 12, even before bowl season, so if all seeds hold in their final regular season games (if all this buzz about Alabama making it over SMU if SMU loses is true, then conference championships are nothing more than regular season games) Alabama being in the playoff isn't the end of the world.

What is the end of the world is the optics of having to choose between 'no thanks' Alabama, 'no thanks' Ole Miss, 'no thanks' Miami, and 'absolutely not' South Carolina. An ideal world would see none of these teams in the playoffs, and I've never heard anybody dispute that. Yet we have to take one of them. That is a problem, and it will never not be a problem for the rest of the history of the sport.

In the spirit of what being a playoff team used to mean, I don't think there are even four of them this season. On that we agree. Oregon, Notre Dame, and..? Who else is there? We would probably have to bring SMU or risk the ACC just not being a power conference anymore, and the fourth team would likely be the SEC auto bid that always unofficially existed in the four team playoff. Either Texas in third or Georgia in fourth.

I think the sport is doing itself a great disservice by allowing all the riff raff in, because popularity figures tend to indicate that people do like dominance. You'll get more total viewers with more games, but less concurrent viewers, which brings less cultural relevance. Baseball's expanded playoffs killed their cultural relevance. Does college football think they're too good for the same thing to happen to them? People crave predictability. The hype for the big matchup. That's why NBA Finals ratings were so high when it was Cavs vs Warriors every year. No die hard basketball fan liked this, but the casuals ate it up.

I'm generally not a fan of placating the casuals, but big playoffs are where casuals and I can find common ground. They're bad for the game, because they often cause the best team and the champion to be different teams, and once you start seeing the best team not be the champion on a regular basis, nobody cares about the championship. Ask NASCAR. Ask MLB and their 'piece of metal' championship trophy.

CFB better hope that either Oregon, Penn State (if they beat Oregon), Notre Dame, Texas (if they beat Georgia), or maybe theoretically Boise State (if they end up with a playoff rematch win over Oregon) win the championship, because if they don't, we're going to have perhaps the least deserving champion in the history of the sport on our hands, and this talk about the worthless championship is going to get started already. Nobody wants that, except apparently the people who thought this 12 team idea was a good idea in the first place.

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Bev Low's avatar

. . . holding onto hope for South Carolina - such an explosive QB. Go, Gamecocks!

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