Today, the first day of 2015, is the first day of a new playoff system designed to prevent the past complaints about who the true college football champion is or should be. As you know, two games today will see the four teams selected as the best representatives of college football, with the two winners meeting, I don't know, probably next weekend. Admittedly, since players started leaving for the NFL a week after their freshman season, it has gotten hard to get that excited about college football (save the Army-Navy game I have watched religiously since long before the time of Rollie Stichweh).
To be candid, I had a little trouble with the arbitrary nature of the old system, both before and after the adopting of the BCS standings method. I used to room with an Arizona State grad in the 1970s, and remember maybe 1975 that the good ol' Sun Devils had a perfect season and didn't get votes as the #1 team and the National Champion. It seemed so, well, wrong.
So even in this first year of playoffs, when four teams are selected by some committee (I think Condi Rice is on that committee, and I'm not joking), there is already complaint that someone's alma mater didn't even get into the playoffs. Now, my alma mater actually did make the playoffs, albeit the Division III playoffs, otherwise known as the "colleges no one ever heard of" playoffs. M.I.T. actually won its first round, before getting obliterated by a school I have already forgotten the name of that, which started with a "W", I think.
But I digress. Here's the thing. The National Championship should go to the best college team in the country for the year. Which of 2-3 teams is actually best may be at issue; by the time you get to #4 or #5 you're talking more about whether teams should be in the playoffs, but you're not talking about whether they're best -- because they're not.
Major League Baseball does not try to insist that its World Series champ is the best team that year; just that it made it through the playoffs and survived to hoist the trophy. I don't know about you, but that's not how I see college football. I want it to be the best team.
So I don't want to hear that old Siwash U. deserves to be in the playoffs; I want to hear that either they are the best team already, and here's why, or don't bother. If the committee didn't see fit to rank a team as even fourth, then we can be pretty sure that, even though there's always the possibility that they could win the two playoff games if they had gotten in, that they weren't the season's best team consistently enough to be there.
We're going to have four teams every year. We know that there aren't exactly four legitimate contenders each year; in fact, there are usually not as many as four. So most years, there will already be a team or two that doesn't belong there -- perhaps Oregon this year; I doubt anyone not embarrassed by all-green uniforms thinks Oregon is a better team than, say, Ohio State this year (in which case they have no business being national champions), even though they will probably beat Florida State tonight.
I do think that there are years in which more than one team can legitimately claim to be the best, so yes, a playoff makes sense. I do distinguish between "the best" and "the one who survived the playoffs", which is why I would never want to go past four teams.
Some will be upset that their team didn't get in. Some will be upset that a particular team did get in and theirs didn't. Some will be upset because their team is so obviously the best that no playoffs are needed. Some (like me) will be upset that players on the field actually will graduate from these schools without the ability to create an English sentence.
We'll need ten years to validate it, but I'm really sure that four is the right number, since two isn't always enough and eight is way too many. No one will be completely happy, and that probably means it will work.
Copyright 2015 by Robert Sutton
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