In football, every game is important because so few games are played. In basketball, much like baseball, individual games lose their meaning, because there are so many more games that are played. Basketball is much more about an entire season than it is a single game. (I will say however, that you are correct that the format of the playoff makes standing out during the regular season much less important than it could be.)

But to my larger point, comparing a hypothetical football playoff to the NCAA basketball conference is the classic strawman. There are wild assumptions made regarding a playoff.

Like it or not, college football has a playoff. It has a two team playoff. Would expanding this really negatively impact conference championships? Maybe in some cases. For instance, it probably would devalue the Big 12 this year, or the SEC last year. But you could also say it would settle the debate once and for all, considering neither of those teams even got a chance to play in the conference championship game.

Beyond this, for every one instance where a conference is devalued, 5 other conferences increase the value of their championship. Honestly, who gives a crap whether Cinci or VT win their conferences. It means nothing. Penn State and USC are playing the Rose Bowl. Oh well. But with a playoff, all these conference championships actually mean something.

Now, again, all this is dependent on the fact that a playoff stays rather small. When you expand so that the top 2-3 teams from each BCS conference make the playoff, the regular season loses importance across the board.

But with a right playoff, the overall importance of the regular season could increase. Currently, you could argue that many games mean nothing. Creating a playoff could change that, if done right.

In most playoff that are in place, roughly 1/3 of the teams in the league make the playoff. Roughly half of BCS conference schools make the NCAA basketball tourney. In the NFL, over 1/3 of the teams make the playoff.

If college football were to adopt an 8 team playoff, less than 7% of the teams would make the playoff. In fact, if only BCS schools made the playoffs, and there were 8 teams, only 12.3% of the available teams would have made it to the playoff. This is a significant difference.

Playoffs can be balanced so that the regular season holds importance, but just because it doesn’t happen for basketball, doesn’t mean that will happen for football.

Yeah, I agree with jtlight, you seem to have compiled the most fallacious arguments against a playoff into one place.

“It would devalue the regular season” is a little silly. The NCAA BB regular season is devalued not because of the tourney, but because they play so many damn games. If football played 30+ games in a season, none of them would matter as much, regardless of the season finale.

College basketball invites 64 teams, that’s nearly 1-in-5. For college football to reach that level, it would need to be more than 20 teams in the playoff. Not going to happen. A playoff system in which the only invitees are conference champions would eliminate virtually all of the arguments presented above. “Who was the Big East champion? The team that made it into the playoffs.”

Comparing the SEC to the NFC South is just silly. In the NFL, nearly half of the teams make the playoffs. Are you expecting to see a 64-team slate in CFB?

None of these arguments work because they can all be solved by a well-designed system. Do I trust the NCAA to design it well? No, but it couldn’t be any worse than the crap we have now.

In college basketball, the only things that matter before the tourney are conference tournaments (which by themselves further relegate the regular season meaningless) that make last cases for bids, and the two UNC/Duke games. Nothing else is worth watching.

It’s telling that pro-playoff advocates talk about “the right system” yet hesitate on telling you what that system is.

For example, in a 8 team format like jtlight mentioned a team like Georgia last year is actually rewarded for having done slightly worse in the regular season. That is, if Georgia had beat Tennessee then it would have had to play an extra game, endangering its playoff position if LSU had beaten them and dropped them to a 3 loss team. As it stood Georgia did get a free ride to the Sugar Bowl but was dismissed by the voters to the national title game they were good enough to play in.

 Conference championship games in general become a bad idea as they allow the chance for the 2nd best team to look worse and be less likely to make a “wild card” bid for the national title, instead now where it allows a team to improve its resume as a way to boost itself into the title game (see LSU 2007 & Florida 2008). Without title games, round-robin style regular season schedules (like in the PAC-10) start to look better to determine a fairer best regular season record, which is nice unless you’re the SEC.

You’d also have problems accounting for teams like Utah and Notre Dame, who aren’t in BCS conferences. Notre Dame of course can pull a higher ranking than most because of pedigree meaning they’re more likely to earn a wild card bid than others, giving them an unfair advantage. This is the same problem that exists in the current system.

The bottom line is that college involves too many teams for a national championship to be done well. It should stay how it is: something on the side that’s a nice bonus to seasons.

Because I like all the disagreements, conversations and arguments each year. You can’t get that kind of entertainment in any other sport. Let it go and enjoy what we have. College football is fine just like it is.

A plus one format adds another game but does not address the underlying problems of the BCS system. Teams near the cut off feel left out, a plus one just pushes this issue down a level. Undefeated teams ranked lower than #4 are still excluded. Why would the university presidents accept a proposal that does not address the perceived problems?

Playoffs are too rigid to meet the unique needs of college football and a fixed number of participants will always produce disagreement at the cutoff. The more teams that are included the greater the magnitude of disagreement at the cutoff; therefore a small number of teams is desirable. Deep playoffs also throw out a century of bowl tradition which would be an enormous travesty to college football.

The only way around the impasse is a national championship system flexible enough to adjust to each year’s individual circumstances.

The devil is in the details, 6 pages of detail. Email me at utesfan100@yahoo.com if you want a copy of these.

Return the BCS bowls to thier historic New Year’s Day time. Add an opptional wild card game (for the most common situations involving 3-5 teams) and use two of these five games, determioned by the conference tie-ins of the top teams, as semi-finals for the national championship game. For cases involving more than 4 teams use play-in games hosted by the favored team for the final spots in the semi-finals.

Once this is settled, allow the remianing BCS bowls to have thier conference tie-ins and make selections free from the scrutiny that comes from claiming to name a national champion.

This year a play-in games with Utah hosting Boise State would have been needed, with the opportunity to play Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl the prize. Florida and Texas would have played in the wild card game. The Fiesta Bowl and wild card game winners would meet in the national championship game.

Alabama and USC, and Georgia last year, failed to win all their games and also failed to built enough consensus to prevent a gap of 0.0600 in the BCS standings from forming ahead of them. These teams maybe pick up a first place vote or two, but not 1/4 of the AP and BlogPoll votes Utah got.

They would certainly not get 4 of the 6 BCS computers to pick them (Anderson and Hester, Massey W-L, Sagarin EOL-CHESS and Peter Wolfe).

USC would have played Penn State in the Rose Bowl.
Alabama would have played Ohio State in the Sugar Bowl.
Virginia Tech would have played Cincinnati in the Orange Bowl.