Ok, that fact that you're still reading this means your predilection for understanding and caring today's topic is significantly increased. This being my last Football Friday until next Fall, I've decided to tackle (hahaha, unexpected football pun) a problem which interests me greatly and is at the forefront of national attention right now: the College Football Postseason. So hang on for a wild ride because we're about to plummet into the extremely complex and controversial.
Alabama has dominated in recent years, but for the second time, a highly ranked Oregon was denied a chance to play the Crimson Tide due to a limiting championship system.
A Brief History
If you follow ESPN or any other sports outlet, chances are that you've heard sports writers refer to the BCS bowl system as "broken". If you don't know the history of the BCS, however, it can often leave you scratching your head as to what exactly is broken and how it got to be that way. Well, I'll attempt to ease some of that confusion with a very brief history of the system that today determines our champions of major college football. (If you already know this, feel free to skip ahead to the next section.)
Prior to 1998, there was no "system" for determining national champions in college football. 'But how did teams win the national championship?' you ask. Well, technically, no team has ever actually won a national championship as the NCAA has never officially sanctioned a champion. That doesn't matter however, as a champion is still recognized and accepted each year by the general public. Before the BCS this process of identifying a champion was done exclusively by third parties, mainly polls, at the conclusion of the season. Teams would play in bowl games (most bowls at this time did not have conference tie-ins, more about that later) and then the polls would be released declaring their own national champions. Typically most of the polls agreed and a single national champion was widely accepted by the public, but sometimes there was major disagreement and almost every season there would be a few national championships handed out by various "major selectors" which were not in line with the rest.
In fact, if you count the years that Florida State was declared a national champion by 1 or more of these "major selectors", FSU could claim SEVEN national championships! (1980, 1987, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1996, and 1999) So why doesn't Florida State prance around with a banner displaying those accomplishments? Well, the reason is that two of those "major selectors", the AP and Coaches polls, are held in higher esteem than the rest. Since inception of those two polls, the generally accepted national champion(s) was declared such by at least one or both of those polls (in years that they crowned different #1's, there was said to be a "split championship").
Fast forward to 1998 when the BCS bowl system was created. Basically, the BCS was an alliance of four major bowls (the Rose, Fiesta, Sugar, and Orange) which guaranteed major conference champions and highly ranked teams the opportunity to play each other in hopes of making the championship selection process easier. More often than naught, the top two ranked teams would face off against each other. For a while this worked out well, but ultimately the desire to have a true "national championship game" spawned the creation of a 5th BCS game: the BCS national championship, in 2006. A complex formula involving human and computer polls would theoretically choose the best two teams in the country and match them up, crowning a de facto national champion. This failed pretty quickly however, as people realized that the formula for picking the best two teams was often flawed and excluded other deserving teams at least the chance of winning or sharing a title. Because of this, and some of the things I'm about to touch on in the next section, it was recently decided to scrap the system beginning in 2014.
A Broken System
1. Bowl Attendance is plummeting.
This year's bowl attendance average, across the board, was down over 3,000 people from last year... and that was down from the year before and the year before and so on. In fact, attendance has dropped so much, that one game (the Military Bowl in Washington DC) managed only to draw a measly 17,000 fans! To put that into perspective, that's just a couple thousand more fans than Lowndes High School's stadium in Valdosta, GA can hold. Some people argue that this is the result of having too many bowls, but if that alone were the case, we wouldn't expect to see a sharp decline in attendance in BCS bowls or bowls featuring teams with major fan bases... but we are. In fact, when UF, a program with very large fan support, is only able to sell 7,000 of it's 17,500 school allotted tickets and the Sugar Bowl has its lowest attendance SINCE 1939, you know something's wrong.
2. Bowl tie-ins cut down on interesting and competitive match ups.
Not too much to say here, case in point is the Orange Bowl this year with FSU and Northern Illinois.
3. Half of FBS is essentially denied a chance to win a national championship before the season even starts.
Because the current format (or even the version coming in 2014) is so exclusive, it's virtually impossible for teams from "mid major" conferences (the Mountain West, Conference USA, Sun Belt, Mid American, formerly WAC, and soon to be Big East) to climb high enough in the rankings for an opportunity to compete for a national championship. Because of this, it cannot be said that we have a true national championship in major college football.
4. A highly exclusive championship game or series drastically cuts interest in every other bowl game.
Having a single national championship game, or even three (including semifinals in two years) decreases interest in every other game that is not the national championship. Now of course this is bound to occur in any scenario where there are non-championship-stake games (like the NIT in basketball), but since it's SO exclusive in college football, almost every game is left with this negative aura, and as a result any season for any team that does not end with a national championship is viewed as a complete failure (not so much the case in any other sport where playoffs are used).
And the obvious...
5. A national "playoff" with only (currently) two or four teams will routinely exclude teams which legitimately have the potential to be the best in the country.
It happens almost every year. This year, Oregon. Previous years, Boise State, USC, Oklahoma, Ohio State, the list goes on and on. Almost every season there's controversy about the team(s) that got left out and it's impossible to answer with absolute certainty whether they deserved it more or not.
A Modest Proposal
And all of that leads up to this: my proposal for a solution to the current BCS mess and current impending lackluster remodeling.
Let's start with the national championship and then address the bowls.
My proposal would be to expand the current expected 4 team playoff to a 16 team playoff with 10 automatic bids going to the 10 conference champions (the WAC is now dead as far as football goes) and 6 at-large bids remaining for the next 6 highest ranked teams. Additionally, each conference would be limited to a maximum number of 4 teams in the tournament so as to prevent a single conference completely stacking the field. This would provide a perfect balance between smaller conferences (like the Sun Belt) and larger ones (like the SEC): On the one hand, teams in smaller conferences would have something to play for (an automatic bid) while larger conferences are not punished for having better competition (the strongest conferences will receive the most bids).
Here's how the tournament would work: 16-teams with 8 first round games to be played at the home field of the 8 highest seeded teams. (1 vs. 16, 2 vs. 15, etc.) The following 2 rounds would be then be played at what are now considered to be the best bowls on a rotating basis. The bowls would get preference in picking whichever match up (resulting from the first round) they wanted based on their order that year. What I mean by this is, bowls in this category would rotate each year, moving up a spot. The top 2 spots would host the semifinals, the other 4 the quarterfinals. Bowl payout (to the teams appearing in the games) and preference for picking a game would increase with each rotation upward. For instance, if the Orange Bowl one year was the highest in the order, and a Florida school made it to that round (regardless of who they'd be playing), the Orange Bowl would probably want to pick that game as to have a higher attendance.
The six quarterfinal and semifinal sites would be: the Orange Bowl, Rose Bowl, Sugar Bowl, Fiesta Bowl, Cotton Bowl, and Chik-fil-A Bowl.
Finally, the national championship game would be bid out each season to any city in the country, similar to how it's done with the NFL. This would generate more revenue for the NCAA and also give fans all across the country an opportunity to see a championship game close by.
As for how the tournament might have appeared this year:
First Round
16. Tulsa (CUSA champs) @ 1. Alabama (SEC champs)
15. Arkansas State (SBC champs) @ 2. Notre Dame (at-large)
14. Utah State (WAC champs) @ 3. Oregon (at-large)
13. Wisconsin (B10 champs) @ 4. Georgia (at-large)
12. Louisville (BEC champs) @ 5. Florida (at-large)
11. Boise State (MWC champs) @ 6. Stanford (P12 champs)
10. Northern Illinois (MAC champs) @ 7. Kansas State (B12 champs)
9. Oklahoma (at-large) @ 8. Florida State (ACC champs)
Quarterfinals
8. Florida State vs. 1. Alabama in the Sugar Bowl
7. Kansas State vs. 2. Notre Dame in the Cotton Bowl
6. Stanford vs. 3. Oregon in the Fiesta Bowl
5. Florida vs. 4. Georgia in the Chik-fil-A Bowl
Semifinals
4. Georgia vs. 1. Alabama in the Orange Bowl
3. Oregon vs. 2. Notre Dame in the Rose Bowl
Championship TBD
***It's important to remember, this was based on the rankings at the end of the regular season, not after the bowl games this year, hence why no Clemson. Obviously if done retrospectively, Clemson would have taken Oklahoma's place.
Critics have two major arguments when it comes to a 16-team playoff: The first is that playing potentially 4 games is too many and cuts into classes. The second is that teams like Arkansas State or a team from the MAC couldn't compete, so why even bother including them?
My answer to both of these criticisms is: First off, every other NCAA sport has a playoff. Every other division of college football (D-III through FCS) has a playoff (with 24-32 teams in each in fact). Somehow all those sports and all those levels of football are able to conduct their playoffs with minimal time lost in class and without any significant extended risk to players. If it can work in virtually ever other level of competition, why not the highest where it's arguably needed the most? And secondly, when was postulating about whether a team can compete ever an argument against an expanded playoff. If anything, that should be an argument IN SUPPORT. Upsets happen every day in football, and even if a smaller team does perform as expected and get blown out, well, those kids and fans will have the thrill of playing in the national spotlight and having the dream of winning a championship regardless of how realistic it is or isn't. No one sees SWAC and MEAC players complaining that they made it to the Big Dance after they lose by 30 points to Duke or Kentucky. Fact is, they made it, and they're proud.
Ok, now with the playoffs out of the way, what about the rest of the postseason? What about the bowls?
Well, I have a solution that would cut down on the number of teams without cutting down on the number of postseason games AND make bowls more exciting and higher attended.
Here's how it'd work:
First off, get rid of all bowl tie-ins and allow the bowls to pick whoever they want. This increases the prospects for interesting and competitive match ups and also increases attendance due to higher excitement levels and closer proximity teams.
Second, divide the non-playoff (current existing) bowls into 3 "tiers" based on payout. Similar to the bowls in the playoffs, bowls within each tier would rotate for selection order. And here's where we cut down on the number of bowls: the lowest tier (Tier 3) would be divided in half into a group A and group B. Each year, the group which would be playing games would flip. So one year, bowls in group A would play, and the next bowls in group B would play. The negative is that each of these bowls would not play each year, but on the flip side, they're not very prestigious and they're compensated for this loss by having lower payouts.
The really neat thing with how this all works out is that since we have multiple rounds of playoffs, we end up with the same number of postseason games as we have now, but fewer, more selective, teams. (There are currently 35 bowls and 70 teams in the postseason, under this proposal there would still be 35 games, but only 56 teams.)
| Rotation | Tier 1 Bowls | ||
| 1 | Capital One Bowl | Clemson | LSU |
| 2 | Outback Bowl | Nebraska | South Carolina |
| 3 | Gator Bowl | Miss State | Navy |
| 4 | Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl | Texas A&M | Oregon State |
| 5 | Alamo Bowl | UCLA | Texas |
| Rotation | Tier 2 Bowls | ||
| 1 | Russell Athletic Bowl | UCF | Michigan |
| 2 | Holiday Bowl | San Diego State | USC |
| 3 | Sun Bowl | Arizona | Texas Tech |
| 4 | Music City Bowl | Vanderbilt | Cincinnati |
| 5 | Pinstripe Bowl | Rutgers | West Virginia |
| 6 | Meineke Car Care Bowl of Texas | Louisiana Tech | Baylor |
| 7 | Belk Bowl | East Carolina | NC State |
| Rotation | Tier 3 Bowls | ||
| 1 | Liberty Bowl | Northwestern | Oklahoma State |
| 2 | Heart of Dallas Bowl | BYU | TCU |
| 3 | BBVA Compass Bowl | Georgia Tech | Ole Miss |
| 4 | Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl | San Jose State | Washington |
| 5 | Little Caesars Pizza Bowl | Toledo | Michigan State |
| 6 | Hawaii Bowl | Arizona State | Air Force |
| 7 | Poinsettia Bowl | Fresno State | Minnesota |
| 8 | New Mexico Bowl | Virginia Tech | SMU |
| 1 | Independence Bowl | Group B | Off |
| 2 | Famous Idaho Potato Bowl | Group B | Off |
| 3 | Beef 'O' Brady's Bowl | Group B | Off |
| 4 | New Orleans Bowl | Group B | Off |
| 5 | Armed Forces Bowl | Group B | Off |
| 6 | GoDaddy.com Bowl | Group B | Off |
| 7 | Military Bowl | Group B | Off |
| 8 | MAACO Bowl Las Vegas | Group B | Off |
***Note, the following teams which made bowls this year would not have made a bowl under this system: Ball State, Bowling Green, Central Michigan, Duke, Iowa State, Kent State, MTSU, Nevada, Ohio, Pittsburgh, Purdue, Rice, Syracuse, UL Lafayette, UL Monroe, and Western Kentucky.
And there you have it. My proposal for how to fix the college football postseason. If you made it through all of that, I want to sincerely congratulate and thank you. Honestly, that took quite the effort. Now if you would please excuse me, I am going to submit this as my thesis.
-JT
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