Reader Request Hour: College Football Playoff

I got a request from a loyal reader humbly asking if we might discuss a college football playoff in this space, even though he wondered if it’s a bit out of scope.

Well, I’m not so sure it’s out of scope. After all, this year it directly effects the Big Ten, which is clearly in the scope of this blog. And he did ask nicely. And besides, I’m trying to heavily encourage reader interaction right now, so we’re talking about college football playoffs!

First of all, I’m convinced that there will one day be a more extensive playoff system in college football. It’s the only major sport that doesn’t have one, but more importantly, there’s too much money to be made to pass it up.

I say “more extensive” because we actually have a playoff in place already in college football. The top two teams in the country, as picked by the BCS system, play a one-game playoff to determine the national champion. And almost every year, the many teams who deem themselves third whine endlessly about it.

It’s safe to predict that if the NCAA implements a four-team playoff, several self-appointed No. 5’s will whine about it; with an eight-team playoff, a glut of No. 9’s will whine; et cetera, et cetera. Don’t believe me? Ask yourself how a seemingly perfect (in terms of fairness and exponential symmetry) 64-team NCAA basketball field somehow got a 65th team awkwardly shoehorned in.

Granted, in many years the complaints from No. 3 are legitimate. The BCS system is fatally flawed. But a larger playoff won’t fix the underlying problem of picking the teams that belong.

I would advocate a ranking formula based mostly on a team’s number of losses, its opponents’ winning percentage, and its opponents’ opponents’ winning percentages, maybe in a roughly 25-50-25 ratio. (You could tinker with the formula, applying it retroactively for maybe 10 years until you got a ratio that gave you the championship game a majority of fans wanted to see each year.) This system would reward teams for playing, and beating, championship-caliber teams in the regular season, and we’d get de facto playoff games during the year. (It would also prevent two teams from staking claims to the Nos. 1 and 2 spots largely because, for example, they beat up on a horrible Big Ten conference all year long. But I think I might have blogged on that topic already.)

Once the rankings are fixed, a larger playoff system has certain advantages. For one thing, you could play the games in December and solve two of the big problems facing college football right now: the schedule creep well past Jan. 1, and the weeks-long layoff for between a team’s last regular-season game and its bowl game.

That said, I see no reason that college football needs to expand its playoffs just to be like other sports. One of the great things about sports is that while they all encompass certain core elements (direct competition, physical ability, strategy, etc.), these elements manifest themselves differently in each sport. This allows fans within the greater sporting community to gravitate toward one or two favorites while still enjoying their colleagues’ favorite sports. Me personally, for spectator sports I get into the NFL and college basketball, and for participant sports I like to play tennis because it’s the most perfectly designed of all sports and volleyball because there’s a lot of women in bikinis in volleyball. The point is, the unmerciful way in which college football picks its champion is befitting of an unmerciful sport. Trust me, you wouldn’t enjoy the games as much if you knew it didn’t matter if your team lost.