You can't blame the Mountain West Conference for wanting a college football playoff. In two of the last five seasons, Mountain West champion Utah went undefeated but wasn't allowed to compete for the national championship. That's just not the way sports should work.But the Mountain West's idea for an eight-team playoff is a badly written, badly conceived proposal that will be dead on arrival in the college football world.
For starters, the four-page proposal (PDF here) is so full of notes and footnotes and jargon like "non-AQ conferences" that it's practically unreadable. Any English professor at the University of Utah would flunk it.
More importantly, it contains absolutely nothing that would convince any of the power brokers in college football to give up what they currently have with the Bowl Championship Series. The purpose of the Mountain West's proposal is ostensibly to persuade the BCS conferences and Notre Dame that they should let the smaller conferences play with the big boys, but nothing in this proposal will even come close to convincing the haves in college football that they'd get more money out of an eight-team playoff than they get out of the status quo of five BCS bowls.
The closest the Mountain West comes to talking turkey with the BCS schools is a sentence in the proposal that says, "An equitable revenue calculation will be determined once all revenue, including from television and the bowls, is known." That, of course, is utterly ridiculous. There's no way to know what "all revenue" will be until after you've gone to the TV networks and the bowls with a proposal that the six BCS conferences and Notre Dame have signed off on. And the six BCS conferences and Notre Dame aren't going to sign off until they're sure their slice of the pie isn't getting smaller. That's just the way the college football world works.
And that's why there's no chance that the BCS will accept this proposal. Here's what the head of the BCS had to say about it:
"We have received the Mountain West proposal," BCS coordinator and ACC commissioner John Swofford said in a statement. "Some of these ideas or similar ones have been addressed before in BCS meetings. We will make sure that the proposal has a full airing by the commissioners and presidents, and we will respond to the Mountain West at the conclusion of those discussions."That sounds like a polite way of saying, "We're putting the Mountain West proposal into our circular file." Which is a shame, because buried in all the bad writing is a pretty good idea about how to reform the postseason in college football.
It does make sense to transform the four marquee bowl games into the first round of an eight-team playoff, and it does make sense to re-think which eight teams make the college football postseason. The Mountain West is right on the merits. It's just wrong about the way to make its case. And that's why this proposal is going nowhere.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
3-05-2009 @ 12:03PM
mike said...
We need a playoff. I wish the Mountain West would stop doing nonsensical things like this that actually make a playoff less likely.
Reply
3-05-2009 @ 1:20PM
peteywak said...
This is the best playoff scenario I can think of. It doesn't include revenue sharing which I know nothing about but it's the fairest thing I can think of. It will be an 8 team playoff, Ideally it would be 16 but unfortunately that would be too time consuming to work well. There would be no guarantee for conference champions because there are only eight slots and not all the conference champions will have gih rankings every year, a team ranked in the late 15-25 has no place competing for a national title For example the Big East and ACC are traditional basketball powerhouses but don't usually have a national power so why sould they get a guarantee over a mid major that happens to be better in a given year. However, A conference champion will be given more consideration and have all tie breaking advantages. Like in college basketball the teams will be selected and seeded by a commitee. The BCS and the rankings system will still be used but they will be as a guideline to help the commitee select the top 8 eligible teams. No more than two teams in a conference can be in the playoffs. I felt that a big reason why people don't want the playoffs is that they don't want to get rid of the four major bowls which is understandable, so in this system, the first round of the playoffs will double as the four major bowls which would be played on January 1st and 2nd and then final four and national championship would be played the following weeks. The traditional matchups of Big Ten vs. Pac 10 would have to go but that's fine it will give more variety to the bowls. And all the other teams that don't make the playoffs will get to play in regular bowl games. It's not a perfect system and I'm sure there will still be teams that will be left out that have a right to complain but given all of the politics that are involved it's pretty fair and a true national champion will be made. The only other option that I would consider having would be a 16 team playoff or 12 teams with the top 4 given a first round bye, that would start a week before New Year major bowl games, this way all the top teams and major conference champions would be able to compete and more flexibility could be given with the seeding. I would like it to be home field advantage for the first round or it can be held on a neutral site. So there you have it, I hope someone reads this and gets it in the hands of the people who have a say in the matter.
Reply
3-05-2009 @ 2:37PM
homebasedworker4 said...
It is time to do away with the BCS and have a playoff. Cut the season back down to 10 games per team (all teams), have the conference championships only of 2 teams finished tied in their conference records, otherwise no conference championship game. After that, the top 16 teams, figured by computer (not sportswriters or coaches), play in a playoff, with the team winning 4 games at the end of the playoff being declared the national champion. Have the No 1 seed play the No 16 seed to start and so on. Start the playoff 2 weeks at end of regular season (rather than 4 weeks) like they do in a lot of the bowl games now, so that the champion is crowned before the Superbowl is played. Champion would play 15 games at the most with the playoff and if they had to play a conference championship game. Currently, a lot of teams are playing 13 games right now. I dont see where 2 more games is going to kill anybody. They can still have lesser bowel games between the teams that dont finish in the top 16, say the next 24 or 12 bowl games (no conference affiliation, just 17 through 40 rankings by computer). No reason a team not finishing in the top 40 should be playing in a bowl game. This would eliminate the 6-6 teams playing in bowl games at the end of the year. A 6-6 team would most definitely not be ranked in the top 40.
Reply