CFR, you gotta get a grip. You may not want a football playoff, but to crap on the NCAA basketball tournament to prove your general dislike for tournaments as a means of crowning a champion is silly.

A few questions:
1. What makes a champion legitimate?
2. How do you think the college basketball champion would be best determined?
3. Do you find anything redeeming about the tournament?

1)For starters, how about winning a series of relatively balanced home/road games against a common foe and then play a few more games "best of X" against another common foe for several rounds? Winner out of all that becomes something of a champion.

Problem is, even with this format it doesn't always work. Look at baseball: certain games (like MLB) cannot sort themselves out well in just a seven game series. The solution is more games although nobody likes to hear that.

Ever read Moneyball? In a one-game scenario in ANY sport there's entirely enough variance to truly have any outcome. By playing game after game after game against a common opponent the two teams tend to sort themselves out, variance is reduced and actual team quality begins to dictate outcomes.

Take a very complicated game like football and it's insane to apply a one game, win and advance or you're out outcome and call the last man standing a legitimate champion.

College football isn't so foolish as to do that. We simply vote on teams throughout the season to establish some kind of pecking order, play some bowl games, vote on someone, call them a mythical champion and do it again the next year. The magic of the regular season is that it gives some reasonable credibility to whoever is named champion. People may disagree each year but it's clear that said team is probably one of the best out there.

The real purpose of the college football game is the regular season itself, playing the set of conference and OOC games and capping it with a bowl. It's one big celebration of football, it's not about the championship so much as the thrill of each game being played. Every single game is of some importance.

2)How would it BEST be determined? Take a look at the NBA Playoffs, that's about the best playoff model out there. Of course with the 300 million teams in D-IA basketball obviously that can never happen.

3)What I find redeeming about it is that it's tremendous proof of why any kind of playoff for D-IA football would be an absolute joke.

To be kind, the tournament is fun, it's nice to fill out a bracket, catch one or two of the interesting games out of the vast many dreadful ones and otherwise watch college basketball fans enjoy their sport.

However it's not my sport and it's not up to me to dictate how they do things. I appreciate what they've made of it but my entire point in mocking it is to establish that their way of doing things isn't much for a legitimate championship. The college football playoff nuts always point to the college basketball tournament as some kind of beacon for championships when it actually is tremendous proof of the weakness of a football playoff.

There's no real championship value to it the NCAA basketball tournament. It's a one and done postseason tournament that ultimately creates tremendous excitement but fails to deliver on its billing as a championship. Just call it what it is, a postseason invitational tournament for sh*ts and giggles, each year someone wins and then you do it again next year. It's no different than say, the Maui Invitational or any of the other hundred-some basketball tournaments out there. You can have a tournament "champion", just don't call that team the "National Champion".

"Take a very complicated game like football and it's insane to apply a one game, win and advance or you're out outcome and call the last man standing a legitimate champion."

How is that different from the college football regular season? When you lose even one regular season game, your chances of being voted national champion are not good.

This season, Wisconsin, Louisville, Ohio State all lost only one game and that was enough to eliminate them. Hell, Boise State didn't even have to lose a game to be eliminated.

Say USC came back and beat UCLA last season, and they did it because 2 UCLA defenders ran into each other, fell down, and the Dwayne Jarrett scored the winning TD as time ran out. If that happened, USC would have played playing Ohio State in the Fiesta Bowl and Florida would have played Notre Dame in the Sugar Bowl.

The whole national championship would have hinged on one play, yet you would not have said that it was illegitimate for USC to win the NC because Florida was the best team. All because of one play.

The bottom line is that college football is filled with "one and done" games and plays. To act this only happens during a playoff scenario makes no sense.

All I know is that a team from the Big Sky or Mid-Atlantic conference should never be competing for a national championship in basketball. It's entertaining having 65 teams, but it's unnecessary and obsurd. If you want a tournament in basketball it needs not be more than 8 teams. In the field of 64, a team ranked in the mid teens (let's take Duke this year), has a legit shot at winning it, as they've shown they are relatively one of the better teams in the country that year, but it's obsurd to say they are the best team in basketball, even if they had reeled of 6 or whatever wins in the tourney.

"The bottom line is that college football is filled with "one and done" games and plays. To act this only happens during a playoff scenario makes no sense."

I think maybe you ran past the point, which is that the greatness of college football, in its entirety, is that the regular/entire season is largely one and done...and thus every regular season game counts for something. Adding an additional one and done layer to the end (a) does nothing to prove anything and (b) would completely undercut the greatness that is the regular season.
The fact that the Mythical National Championship may have come down to one play - in the regular season - be it one play in the UCLA/USC game, or a blocked field goal in the UF/USCar. game - is exactly what elevates this sport above the rest.
P.S. The NCAA tournament started with 8 teams. I will leave it to someone older than me to reflect on how the evolution from 8 to 65! has altered the sport over time.

America's infatuation for rooting for underdogs is why such jokes as the NCAA tourney and yearning for NCAA playoffs exist.

I love the NBA because the best teams play each other and the best teams win. Most people hate the NBA because of that predictability.

At the end of the day, I want to see the best teams and players playing. I don't care about the Boise States having their day in the sun.

Stephen Kim, did you ever go to college in Indiana?

No, I went to college at Baylor. Do you know a Stephen Kim in Indiana or something?