Oh, rejoice! CFR, the funniest site on the web, has returned.

One of the guys nearly spit his coffee when you wrote college football is the only sport with a semblance of a regular season. Way to conflate the argument there. Like I wrote, we laughed pretty hard on that sentence.

Do you do requests for humor pieces? Here's one. If Division I-AA had a bowl game and Division II bowl game, then why would their BCS title game look different than the actual championship game.

In both divisions, the top two ranked teams are not competing for the championship season.

Also, we think the regular season in Division I-AA is an utter joke too. With that playoff system in place, who cares that Appy State beat Michigan? On the other hand, without the playoff system, Appy State would not play for the title game despite beating Michigan.

Tomorrow, we have to give a progress report. There will be lots of frowny faces. Please, please, CFR, give us a piece on how great is that an undefeated team cannot play for a national title. That will turn our frowns upside down.

More humor observations.

One of our guys was out of the office, but he too pissed his pants when he read the column. Passing along more evidence of why this is the funniest site on the internet:

"...link between a postseason tournament in a sport and its regular season being treated as nothing more than seeding? Maybe that's why college football's the only sport with a truly compelling regular season"

Yes, it is so compelling Purdue and Central Michigan will play AGAIN and UCLA and BYU will play AGAIN. Why? The Motor City Bowl must take the seventh place team from the Big 11 and the conference champs from the MAC. The Las Vegas Bowl must take the fifth place team from and the Pac 10 and the conference champs from the MWC.

Good thing these two teams played a regular season to determine that Purdue finished tenth, CMU won the MAC title, BYU won the MWC title, and UCLA finished fifth.

No seeding going on here. Nope.

Your funny.

"If Division I-AA had a bowl game and Division II bowl game, then why would their BCS title game look different than the actual championship game.

In both divisions, the top two ranked teams are not competing for the championship season."

You realize that you just made CFR's case for him.

What we realize is that you Senator are CFR.

I think what's at the heart of the matter is that the media constantly pushes it down our throats that a playoff would solve all our problems. That "WE NEED TO SETTLE IT ON THE FIELD" is the only answer to all the problems.

What's inherently flawed in that argument is the idea that "LUCK" plays such a huge role in those single games. This idea has been lapped up by people at large in that if a team beats another team on a given day in that 3-hour span, the said winning team is somehow that much better than the losing team despite the score being 17-14.

That's not crowning a national championship. I prefer to think of myself as a baseball analyst first and foremost and most baseball insiders think even the 7-game series that is the World Series is so luck filled it's ridiculous.

Look at what Joe Torre said in his press conference after the Yankees lost to Cleveland in this year's ALDS. A reporter asked him what he thought about his run as the Yankees skipper if this was his last tenure as Yankees manager (which it was) and Torre started talking about how the playoffs are simply one big crapshoot and if you win them, it's more about luck than anything else.

Baseball comes the closest to college football in the regular season given that baseball plays 162-games, but even then the power that be tell are trying to get as much luck into baseball as possible with expanded divisions, non-balanced schedules and interleague play. We even let an exhibition determine home field advantage if you can actually get your midn around that!

If you can't get the luck out of a 162-game season then how in the blue hell are you going to get it out of a 4-team playoff at the end of the year in college football when you are talking about 18-21 year old kids and not professional athletes?

It's simply insane. I ABSOULTEY HATE THE IDEA of a college football playoff, but if there is one, I don't want to hear how it will crown a "TRUE" champion that won it on the field.

That's simply not true and never will be. CFR has it right. College football is the only sport left with a regular season that matters the most.

People want to complain about Ohio State & LSU? I don't get it. LSU won their conference with 2 losses. The best record in college football (excluding Hawaii) was Ohio State's 11-1 mark. I suppose you can argue that USC (10-2 & Pac 10 champs) and Oklahoma (11-2 & Big XII) champs could claim they should get a shot, but if want a chance for the prize, don't get beat.

Oklahoma got beat by Colorado. Inexusable. USC got beat by Stanford. Inexcusable. Those were regular season games that were huge at the time they happened, but if we instill a playoff, those games are meaningless and that would hurt the fabric of college football. Not only that, but those games wouldn't mean anything and a 4-team or 8-team playoff still wouldn't crown a truer champion than what we have right now with the current BCS.

The math just doesn't work.

This guy argues that you are wrong, CFR: http://teamrankings.com/ncf/articles/128/mwoods/the-meaningful-game-mirage

mmortal03,

That guy's article is ridiculous. He starts off by saying argument against a playoff are paper thin and then never goes into detail about those arguments or why they are paper thin in the first place. It's just a generalized statement he makes without any proof at all of why they are the way he says. It's insane.

Then of course he brings out the tired argument about the 2004 Auburn team. Arguing that because USC and Oklahoma ran the table, Auburn might as well have gone 0-13 is utterly ridiculous. What numbnuts forgets it that nobody guarantees that Auburn would have won a playoff game. Assume for a second we had a 4-team playoff and USC was the #1 seed. That would have put #2 v. #3 which would have pitted Auburn against Oklahoma. Maybe Auburn wins that game, but I think most would agree that USC was the very best team that season. Now could have Auburn beat Oklahom and USC in back to back weeks to claim a national championship? Maybe, but we'll never know and even with a playoff, we still might have never knows. Either way, the writer is arguing that somehow Auburn's regular season was useless because they didn't play the games, but he'd be singing a compeltely different tune had USC or Oklahoma lost a game. That's like saying because LSU lost to Kentucky in triple OT this season, they might as well mailed in the season and lost the rest of their games because at the time it looked like Ohio State and West Virginia were locks for the National Championship.

The writer's argument in 2005 is even more absurd. USC & Texas ran the table. Alabama lost to LSU. That's the way it goes and it's precisely the reason the regular season means so much. He argues that if Alabama would have beaten LSU then they would have gone 13-0, but didn't Alabama lost to Auburn the next week and then didn't even play in the SEC Championship game and actually finished 3rd in the SEC West!

That's backwards thinking. Well, if my team didn't lose to Northern Illinois we'd be #1. He's arguing the same point as to why the regular season is important. Alabama had to win those games against LSU & Auburn. They didn't so what is he whining about.

People can whine all day about 2004 and Auburn, but people, like said writer, conveniently forget that Auburn went into the Sugar Bowl and barely beat Virgina Tech 16-13 while USC beat Oklahoma 55-19! Maybe Auburn was better than Oklahoma that year and they can complain that they should have gotten the shot, but from the bowl games, we can conclude that the Sooners didn't deserve to be on the field with USC and that Auburn had a very tough time with a Virginia Tech team who got beat by USC by 11 points on a nuetural field and who also lost to a 5-6 NC State at home.

I mean, Va Tech loses to USC by 11 and also loses to a sub-.500 NC State team at home. Auburn only beats VaTech by 3 points and USC beats Oklahoma by 36 points in a championship game. I mean, I suppose you can argue Auburn could have gotten a shot at USC, but what for? So they could get beat by 2 TD on the national stage?

At the end of the day, USC was the national champions in 2004 and I don't see any problem with that at all. If the 2004 Auburn Tigers are the lone example of why college football needs a playoffs, then the only thing that is paper thin, is the idea of a playoff system.

I've been challenging anyone and everyone on my blog for 3 years to mathematically argue that a college football playoff would crown a true champion. Nobody has been able to do that and the reason is that it's impossible given the sample size. This is why the playoff format stinks and if given the choice, I'm sticking with the historical fabric of college football, which means no playoffs.

I think he is JUST saying that Auburn never had the chance to win it ALL. If a 13-0 team from the SEC doesn't have a chance to win it all, then they might as well have never stepped on the field as far as to win it all. I disagree with him if he says that those games Auburn won meant "nothing", because the fans at Auburn were still excited at a CHANCE to go to the National Championship. However, not being able to control your own destiny even at 13-0 is ridiculous. I will now post here what I posted there, with some minor revisions:

"I think people will agree that we can’t have a playoff that includes all teams, obviously. So, the argument becomes, how large (or small) of a playoff pool is enough to select the deserving teams?

First off, I would argue that you are building up a straw man argument above, because I don’t think many people are actually saying that we should stick with the BCS EXACTLY as it currently stands, and that otherwise, with ANY change, it would keep the regular season from being as important.

What I think many people are instead saying is that they want to keep the regular season as similar to being a “lose more than 2 games/play a ridiculously easy schedule (like Hawaii), and you are virtually out of contention” system as much as possible.

They want to retain the bowl game setup, and they don’t want to extend the season more than one game, or take away from the amount of regular season games that are played.

My argument is that going to a playoff LARGER than 4 teams (a plus one system) WOULD require unnecessary restructuring of the regular season (it would probably require removing games), or it would extend the season for the winners more than what would be acceptable for student athletes.

If you go to a plus-one BCS system, though, then it strikes up a happy medium of still retaining the regular season’s importance, because a team still has to win the majority of its games to rank highly enough, but then it also doesn’t just come down to the current error of relying on a poll for choosing only two teams.

See, with a larger than plus-one (four team playoff) system, the one-game battles in the playoffs would start to become more about rewarding the lucky, the injury-free, and the hottest teams, instead of rewarding the teams who have played the best full season resumes.

Take a look at College basketball. I think that basketball is a sport that can be much more forgiving by not placing such credence on a one night upset loss during the regular season, because a larger number of games are played. I do think that one and your done in the tourney is a little extreme, though.

However, when you play a game where you can only have one game a week, and then apply the constraint that you must fit it into an academic semester, then those games played during the regular season better not be trivialized all because some 16 seed with 4 losses happened to beat you at the buzzer because your star player happened to be injured.

With a plus-one system, every year that we have had the BCS, the controversy would have been very arguably solved. The teams below the top four just didn’t have very good excuses for why the lost the games that they did that put them out of the running. This year will be another example where 4 teams after the conference championships WILL be the most deserving teams.

See the following for Phil Steele’s plus-one method, which I really like:

http://www.philsteele.com/Articles/determnationalch.html "

mmortal03,

I think where we disagree is the thought that a plus one system would eliminate controversy. I don' think you can do that. Let's go back to Phil Steele for a minute and his "+1" format. In the 2007 annual he goes as far back as 1997 so I'll start there:

In 1997 Steele says #1 Nebraska (12-0) against #4 UNC (10-1) and #2 Michigan (11-0) against #3 Florida St (10-1). The controversy begins with UNC beating Nebraska and Michigan beating FSU and then UNC beating Michigan. Well, Florida State beat North Carolina that year in Chapel Hill rather handily. I should know, I was at the UNC/FSU game back in 1997. The "+1" system there wouldn't worked.

1998 Steele says #1 Tennessee (12-0) v. #4 Kansas St. (11-1) and #3 Ohio St (10-1) v. #2 Florida St. (11-1). UCLA was 10-1 and Arizona was 11-1 that year but Steele says the Pac-10 was weak so they didn't deserve to be there. Yeah, try selling that point in today's media. It ain't happening.

1999 Steele says #1 Florida St (11-0) v. #4 Wisconsin (9-2) and #3 Nebraska (11-1) v. #2 Virginia Tech (11-0). Steele says a 9-2 Michigan team wouldn't get in because of their two losses, but that 9-2 Michigna team beat that 9-2 Wisconsin team that STeele put in. How is that playable?

2000 Steele says #1 Oklahoma (12-0) v. #4 Washington (10-1) and #2 Florida St (11-1) v. #3 Miami-FL (10-1) although Oregon STate and Virginia Tech each had one loss too and FSU had already lost to Miami-FL earlier in the year. Why put a rematch and why is FSU seeded higher than the Hurricanes?

2001 Steele says #1 Miami-FL (11-0) v. #4 Oregon (10-1) and #2 Nebraska (11-1) v. #3 Colorado (10-2), but what about Illinois at 10-1 in 2001? Why two Big 12 teams and a 1-loss team out of the Big 10 gets left out? What about Tennessee? They were 10-2 and Nebraska didn't even play in the Big XII Championship that year.

2002 #1 Miami-FL (12-0) v. #4 Georgia (11-1) and #2 Ohio St. (13-0) v. #3 Iowa (11-1). Steele says the next best teams were 2-loss teams so this is the first time since 1997 that Steele can argue the 4-team playoff could work, but back in 2002 there was NO DOUBT both Ohio State and Miami-FL were the two best teams and they played in the championship.

2003 #1 USC (11-1) v. #4 Michigan (10-2) and #2 Oklahoma (12-1) v. #3 LSU (12-1). Even STeele says here you only need 3 teams, but given luck, what would have happened if Michigan wins 2 in a row? Controversy solved?

2004 #1 USC (11-0) v. #4 Utah (11-0) and #2 Oklahoma (11-0) v. #3 Auburn (11-0). Steele again says only top-3 needed and Utah being top-4 is laughable although what happens when Utah pulls a Boise State and beats USC by 1 point on pure luck and then Oklahoma beats Auburn and then the SOoners beat Utah by 50. Controversy solved knowing USC beat Oklahoma 55-19 when they played heads up?

2005 Steele has #1 USC v. #4 Ohio State and #2 Texas v. #3 Penn St. Steele says here only Texas & USC needed to be in which is what we got.

2006 Steele said #1 Ohio St. v. #4 LSU and #2 Florida v. #3 Michigan. No USC although USC housed Michigan in the Rose Bowl and didn't Michigan lose the week before to Ohio State?

Like I've said before and before and before, setting up a 4-team playoff or a plus 1 format or a 16 team playoff isn't going to crown anymore of a "true" champion at the end of the season than what we currently have. It's that simple. Nobody can prove it mathematically so everyone talking about how a playoff would solve everything is simply wrong and at the end of the day the sample size is the problem you simply can't argue.

Thus, with such a small sample size, you have to make EVERY SINGLE GAME COUNT in order to maximize the possibility of getting it right. I can almost guarantee you that the current BCS would get it right more times than a 4-team playoff would. Introduce that much luck and it's going to rear its ugly head.

Let's face it, the only argument is 2004 Auburn, but if Auburn fans were smart they'd want to go back to the old system. That way Auburn could have went 13-0 and then hoped for the AP or Coaches to vote them as National Champions because let's face it, Auburn would have gotten smacked around by USC. It's a great story to say Auburn got screwed and I'm sure Auburn fans want to tell you this (I'm not saying you're an Auburn fan), but USC beats Auburn just as bad, if not worse than they beat Oklahoma.

Playoff proponents are arguing a point they can't possibly defend in much the same way I can't defend that 1+1 = 3.

Those scenarios have their flaws but they are all better results than what happened with only 2 teams getting in. With 4 teams, the arguments that the system doesn't work become much less respectable and of less consequence. Arguing that #5 or #6 didn't get in in those scenarios is beside the point. In all of those scenarios the system would have worked, with minor tweaking of how the teams were seeded or applying the current BCS formula. The four teams that Steele puts in are just his personal opinion. The voters and the computers would have much less chance of screwing up when picking 4 teams. If the top two teams across the entire regular season are not in the top 4 in the country in a plus-one scenario, then one of those "top two teams" made enough of a screw up to not be there in the opinion of the computers and the voters. I am not saying that there wouldn't be controversy, but the controversy would be lessened significantly, and getting in would still fall squarely on the results of a team's regular season.

mmortal03,

Good thoughts. I guess my thought revolves around the purity of the college game. We've never had a playoff and if I guess I had to pick, I'd actually go back to the old way of doing things. If 2 teams wind up undefeated, I guess I didn't feel there was a crime against humanity that those 2 teams didn't play one another in the old bowl system before the BCS.

I think the biggest issue is that even you admit that a playoff wouldn't eliminiate controversy but rather just lessen the controversy. I guess there is merit to that, but wrong is wrong and just because it's a little bit less wrong doesn't make it right.

I'm a complete frontrunner so I always want the two best teams to play no matter what. Does the BCS get that right? Maybe. Maybe not. 2004 is a great example because of the 3 undefeated teams. Is 2007 another great example? Maybe. Nobody went undefeated and it's fairly clear that on any given week anyone of 10-12 teams could beat the other one.

So does that mean the winner of LSU/Ohio State is the "True" national champion? Maybe I suppose. Those are the two teams playing one another and I don't have a problem with LSU at 11-2 and SEC Champions getting in. Ohio State rubs me the wrong way only because they played a very weak non-conference slate and the Big 10 was weak. I think a team like USC or Oklahoma might be better, but Ohio State went 8-0 in the Big 10 and 11-1 overall. They have the best record of any BCS team and that's all they can do and it worked out for them.

The big argument for a playoff is that you settle it on the field, but in college football you'd only introduce even more modes of "LUCK" into the equation which gets us further away from a true champion.

Right now the easiest way to think about it is that with the BCS, the regular season is a 12-game playoff. Getting a loss won't kill you completely but it puts you behind the 8-ball considerably. Two losses (unless it's a wacky year like 2007) is a coup de grace and it's over.

On the other hand, a 4-team playoff now makes it a 2-game season in which luck can play an even bigger factor. Just think about baseball for a minute. If 162-games can't get luck out of the equation, then how is 12 or even 2 going to be a better alternative?

The base argument for a college football playoff is that it allows for the best team in college football to win even if they had a bad game or two.

HOWEVER, that argument is completely thrown out the window. Right now, most college football pundits are going crazy about the best teams in the country probably being Georgia and USC right now. Let's say that is true just for a second.

The first problem is how to get Georgia into a 4-game playoff. They didn't win the SEC East or the SEC so that puts them AT LEAST behind Tennessee and LSU. If you say that Georgia is the "BEST" team at the end of the season, then proponents would have to figure a way to get Georgia into the playoffs. Assuming UGA would get in, then I think the following would have to happen:

SEC: LSU, Tennessee, Georgia
Big XII: Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma
Big 10: Ohio State, Illinois
PAC 10: USC, Arizona State
ACC: Virginia Tech, Boston College
Big East: West Virginia, Cincinnati (?)

That's 14 teams that would at least have a right to play. You'd need 2 Wild Cards just to get it to 16 and I'm guessing those spots maybe go to Florida & Hawaii because if you are taking 16 teams, it's hard to turn away a 9-win Florida team and a 12-0 Hawaii team.

If you think USC is in then you'd at least have to argue for:

SEC: LSU, Georgia
Pac 10: USC
Big 10: Ohio State
Big XII: Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma
ACC: Virginia Tech
Big East: West Virginia

That's 9 teams. Maybe you add 3 more and give the top-4 teams byes.

But at this point, you cannot avoid the controversy that would follow if USC & Georgia had to get into some kind of playoff format.

It's a difficult question. I'm completely against a playoff, but if we went to it, we'd be no closer in determing who the best team is and if that is the point, then "fixing" the problem with a playoff isn't fixing the problem.

Good discussion.

Forget Auburn. The fallacy here is comparing NFL divisions to College Football. Each NFL division has only 4 teams in it, so of course if there's only one good team in that division (i.e. the NFC South), it will rack up a big lead.

In college football, any playoff system larger than a "Plus 1" system will have some sort of guarantee for each BCS conference champ, if not every conference champ. Thus, winning the conference will be just as important as when it meant going to a BCS bowl. Those who narrowly missed the conference title would have a chance to make the playoffs as an at large team, just as now they have a chance at making the BCS as an at large team.

The importance of the regular season doesn't vanish, because when you're talking about 8 or 16 teams out of 120 getting a playoff bid, or at least 6 guarantees out of 63 BCS teams, it's going to be awfully tough to get one. The focus will be as it always was - win the conference. The only difference would be that the conference champs' reward will have changed: a playoff guarantee rather than a BCS guarantee.

The reason the college football regular season is so special is because a huge number of teams are playing for a small number of good bowls. That huge number of teams however creates scheduling discrepancies that can't be solved without more inter-conference games. In a playoff system, you have a huge number of teams playing for a small number of playoff spots. The value of every regular season game is preserved for that reason, and you get the inter-conference games of a playoff to solve everything on the field.

100% in agreement, CFR. It's kind of funny when you hear the Mark Mays of the world rave about how exciting the regular season is and then say, "with a playoff adding to the regular season, it would make college football much more exciting."

Note to May: You can't have it both ways. You can have March Madness or three months of prolonged, weekly excitement. Your choice.

I'll take the regular season, thank you. Plus, bowls are exciting. They're special to the smaller schools such as Florida Atlantic. Granted, you get your ridiculous bowls like the rematches in the Motor City and Las Vegas Bowls, but you get great matchups like the New Mexico Bowl and the Insight Bowl. They aren't necessarily the biggest teams, but there are some great games this bowl season. You just have to learn to appreciate them.

Unfortunately, a plus one format is what it looks like it'll be. I like college football the way it is, don't fix it if it isn't broken.

Greetings and Happy Holidays,

I'd be interested in getting your take on my playoff proposal since it is not an NFL styled 8-game loser out format that diminishes the regular season. With my system in play, it would in fact, clear up the fogginess of not only crowning the BCS national championship participants, but the other BCS and upper tier bowl venues as well.

The BCS Busters Model would in fact truly make every game a playoff in college football. Check out the brackets page at www.ncaa-schedule.com and my 6 part playoff proposal at www.bcsbusters.wordpress.com

What does "I've been challenging anyone and everyone on my blog for 3 years to mathematically argue that a college football playoff would crown a true champion" even mean? What the hell is a "true" champion? A champion is nothing more and nothing less than the winner of first place in a competition. Anyone with two brain cells could propose a format that would determine a "true" winner of first place in a competition.

Also, for CFR, competition is not about the best teams. Teams compete to determine a winner, not which is the better team. If the best team does not win a playoff, this does not undermine the purpose of the playoff any more than the rules of football are undermined when an upset occurs.

www.objectiverules.blogspot.com

Unlike the NFL where the limited number of teams allows for teams to clinch playoff berths and seeds early, college football's larger pool of teams does not really allow for this. At the link below is my blog on the importance of each team's last game under my proposed format if applied to the top 16 teams only if the result were reversed. Only five of the top 16 teams would have clinched berths before their last regular season game and all five had 1-3 home playoff games at stake. How many of those games are meaningful under the current setp to just so a loss in September and October can eliminate most teams?

http://objectiverules.blogspot.com/2007/12/day-of-rest.html