The college football playoff

[Matt]

I'm already convinced this 4 team format is just as controversial as the old way. I thought all along it should be 8 teams.

Take a look at the mess that the committee has in coming up with the 4 teams. By all accounts, Alabama and Oregon are in as 1 and 2. Then you have Florida State, winners of 29 straight games, probably the third team in. But then again, maybe not, as the committee has been slowly dropping the Seminoles down the rankings each week. Okay, they are not as impressive as last season, but 29 straight is 29 STRAIGHT. How can they not be in?

Then you have three teams with one loss each, Ohio St, TCU, and Baylor. These seem to be the teams fighting for the last spot. Advantage Ohio St? They put up a 59-0 win over Wisconsin in the Big 10 title game, while the Big 12 doesn't have a title game. A game that would have featured TCU and Baylor had they had one. A game that might have given the winner at least a better argument for being in the final 4. Anyone taking odds that the Big 12 will have a title game next year should both teams get snubbed?

I still think a better solution is the 8 team format. Let the winners of the Big 10, Big 12, SEC, ACC, and Pac 12 have automatic berths. Then have 3 at large berths for the other 5 conferences, decided by the committee. Yes, you might get some controversy over who the 8th team selected is, but it's a lot better than controversy over the 4th team in a 4 team format. Oh, and if your not in a conference, TFB, no playoff spot (I'm looking you Notre Dame!)

[roncollins]

Eight teams has always been the obvious answer as far as I'm concerned ... or even better, cut the regular season by a couple games and make it at least 16, or arguably 32. Ten regular season games, then 1-5 more games for the best teams would seem to be a fine lot of games.

[Evas]

I think answer is an 8 team playoff, but I am against conference winners getting automatic bids. I think conference championships should be taken in to consideration in the selection process. I just don't think they should yield automatic berths. Most conference winners would likely get in with a 8 team field, but it wouldn't be guaranteed. I really dislike the idea of weak conferences gaming the system.

Speaking of which, I hope the Big 12 gets screwed this season. Not having a conference championship game is a cop out. They deserve to suffer for trying to be greedy and set up multiple teams from their conference to get in.

Non conference teams getting in doesn't bother me, as long as they are held to the same standards as everyone else (strength of schedule, etc.). I don't have any special attachment to conferences.

I actually like the current system a lot, I just think 4 is too low of a cutoff for the number of teams. Losing one game is hardly a justification for not even getting a shot at competing for a championship. A quick glance through the last 10 years of AP rankings showed that there wasn't once more than 8 teams with 1 loss or less.

16 might be too many for me. Then it starts to be more of a tournament and the regular season doesn't mean as much.

[Evas]

Eight teams has always been the obvious answer as far as I'm concerned ... or even better, cut the regular season by a couple games and make it at least 16, or arguably 32. Ten regular season games, then 1-5 more games for the best teams would seem to be a fine lot of games.

The challenge with this is all of the lost games. Most teams play more than 10 games now, that would be a lot of lost revenue for home games.

[Matt]

I think if you win a conference championship in one of the power 5 conferences, it should be an automatic bid. You have competed in a tough conference, and that conference championship game serves is in effect a playoff game.

As for the weaker conferences, they should not be guaranteed a spot by winning the conference championship. Here is where the selection committee would have work to do. The committee could choose amongst the teams who win conference championship, or possibly include a team from a power conference who maybe lost a hard fought game in the conference championship and came up just short. Or maybe a team with one loss who just didn't get into their conference championship game.

I am totally against an independent team making the playoffs. Notre Dame has always gamed the system to their advantage and enough is enough. Put on your big boy pants, play by the same rules as all the other teams, and join a conference. Or be 'special' and sit on the outside looking in come playoff time.

I think 8 teams is perfect if you have conference championship games in all the conferences. In effect, that serves as the first round of the playoffs. The following week you pair of the 8 seeded teams (second Saturday of December). The 4 winners pair off just like now in a New Years Day Bowl. A week later two teams left standing square off for the title.

[Borealis]

I think the plan was to go 8 after the initial run of 4s, but I'd bet it doesn't take but one or two years before they make the change. I do think the big conferences get auto-bids, but let's not forget the smaller schools - Hello Boise, and for all the hating ND gets - and I am part of that party, they have improved the scheduling (I think they played 3 or 4 Pac-10 schools this year) and I bet played fear cup cakes than an SEC school....

Go Ducks... Go Buckeyes....

[roncollins]

Though they remain independent, ND is now contractually required to play a number of ACC schools in football due to their affiliation with the ACC in most other sports. ND will never join a football conference as long as they can retain their own television network. They have traditionally played some pretty decent schedules in the past, though. Overall, anyway.

[Coqui]

Speaking of which, I hope the Big 12 gets screwed this season. Not having a conference championship game is a cop out. They deserve to suffer for trying to be greedy and set up multiple teams from their conference to get in.

NCAA regs don't permit you to have a conference championship game unless you have at least 12 teams. I doubt that the conference is refusing to admit teams just so that it does not have a conference championship game. Those things bring in a lot of revenue, after all. . . and the Big 12 had one back when it was, you know, actually the Big 12.

Of course, if you want to blame Texas for killing the old Big 8 and running off all of the good teams, that's fine with me, a Mizzou fan.

[Denny]

If it was up to me, we would do things the good old way: NO playoffs, conference-assigned bowl games, and a couple different polls so people can endlessly debate who the true champion should be. There's no way to avoid bitching no matter how many teams are in the playoffs, so why not leave everything up to debate?

Of course I also think they should bring back the Big 8 and the SWC conferences as they were back in the day.

Also, I don't really care about college sports now that I've graduated from college, so feel free to take that into account

[Bill]

I think the playoff committee pretty much got everything they wanted and more. Plenty of talk, plenty of meaningful games at the end, blue bloods at the end of the day. Perfect. The only thing I was surprised about was that they didn't matchup Bama/FSU in the Sugar Bowl and Oregon/OSU in the Rose Bowl. That's the way it seemed to be setup from the week before with TCU at #3. I guess the Urban/Saban storyline was too good to pass up.

I don't see them moving to 8 teams soon. Basically then it would be a bunch of second place teams sitting at home watching to see if they can sneak it at 7 or 8. Or seeing if teams like Wisconsin, Ga Tech, or Missouri can pull an upset and sneak in. Think of if Wisconsin beat OSU, then it's somewhat likely that Mich St and Wisconsin get in and OSU doesn't. Mich St gets rewarded for losing earlier. Too much of that.

[Coqui]

I think that the 4 team playoff is maybe only slightly better than the old system. It seemed to me that the committee this year played a bit fast and loose with the rankings, as compared to how human rankings have historically moved. TCU falls three spots after winning it's final game by eleventy billion points? That's not kosher, if you are a fan of human rankings being stare decisis.

In reality, the top 3 teams were pretty obvious this year. Alabama was the best team in the best conference. Florida State was the undefeated defending champion. Oregon was pretty clearly the 'best' one-loss team other than Alabama and finished strong to boot. I'd rank them:

Florida State
Alabama
Oregon

if it were me, but that's pretty small beer in the grand scheme of things.

I think that TCU, Baylor, and Ohio State all have equally good arguments for being the 4th team, and no other team had a plausible argument. If I had my druthers, I'd put either TCU or Baylor ahead of Ohio State - the Big 10 is weaker than it's ever been, and the Big 12 was pretty solid this year, but difficulty in saying whether TCU or Baylor was more deserving and (IMHO) Ohio State's status as a traditional power spelled the difference.

That's all OK with me, I guess. I would probably prefer an 8-team playoff with the Power 5 conference champions getting automatic bids, and 3 at-large bids determined by the committee.

[Bill]

There is no way FSU is the best team in college football. The best team in college football doesn't fall 3 touchdowns behind anyone, let alone like 5 different teams. Maybe I just saw them too much, but they looked so vulnerable in so many games.

[Apollos]

I don't see them moving to 8 teams soon. Basically then it would be a bunch of second place teams sitting at home watching to see if they can sneak it at 7 or 8. Or seeing if teams like Wisconsin, Ga Tech, or Missouri can pull an upset and sneak in. Think of if Wisconsin beat OSU, then it's somewhat likely that Mich St and Wisconsin get in and OSU doesn't. Mich St gets rewarded for losing earlier. Too much of that.

My understanding is that the NCAA basically entered a 12 year contract with the 4 team playoff and in order for it to be changed, the D1 conference commissioners would have to vote unanimously for a new system. Given how little these guys agree on when it comes to athletics, I can't see them all getting together to make a change for the better, particularly in light of the fact that it took 100+ years to institute a 4 team playoff. Once the money rolls in, I'm confident they'll milk as much as they can out of the playoff and thus, we'll prob have a 16 team field within a couple decades.