I certainly see your point, but I’m hesitant to assume college football’s regular season would automatically go the way of college basketball if a playoff were adopted.

Most of the playoff scenarios for college football I’ve seen have been for eight teams. These would be the winners of the “BCS” conferences and a couple at-large’s (just like the BCS originally was before the added national championship game). I can’t see how this would diminish the regular season at all. The goal for every team will still be to win their conference or finish in the top 8. With a playoff though, all eight of those teams have a shot at ending up number one.

The college basketball tournament is exciting because every team has a chance to win. Playoffs in college football would do the same thing for those eight teams…how could that hurt the regular season?

Not to mention the obvious differences between football and basketball, being basketball has three times as many games and there are 64 teams in the tournament. This in itself almost makes basketball’s regular season worthless. With so many games and so many teams accepted, you don’t have to be excellent, you don’t even have to be great. You just have to be pretty good in the regular season and you’ve got your shot at a title. With 10 or 11 games in football and eight teams into the playoffs the bar is still set high, and if you lose more than one game in the regular season that’s pretty much it for your shot.

…see St. Mary’s, or Utah State. St. Mary’s lost a couple games and didn’t get into the tournament. Utah State was projected to be left out even though they had won 29 games until they won their tournament. It is not like teams are trying any less to win every game they can. I would say the main reason the regular season is meaningless is because fans don’t care as much. The players still do, the games still mean a lot, but only the die hard fans care about each game. They also don’t have to care about other teams, because unlike in college football, if there team takes care of business, they will have a chance to prove themselves. They don’t have to wait for others ahead of them to lose. And if the casual basketball fan has less interest in the season, too bad for them. People who love basketball still love the regular season.