Comments on: College football playoffs

By: Donnie

Donnie — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 14:52:57 +0000

@Derek: I think there are only 119 teams…so we’ll have to pull 6 from somewhere.

Re: UNC. You’ll have to hang your hat on basketball for the foreseeable future. I wonder whether Baylor or UNC will reach a BCS game first.

@Wahrheit: That is a shame. But the system has money to think about, which is why there are so many blasted bowls. The good part about almost everyone except Temple, Duke and Buffalo making a bowl game is that there’s a strong chance your team will be in the post-season somehow!

Re: 6-7 weeks wait time. Yeah, but the “student-athletes” have finals to think about!

@Tom: The good part about having that many teams is that the best team in the nation will have a chance to play. The bad part is that they probably wouldn’t win. It would be exciting, though. I’d go with 4, but that’s my cranky mathematical part talking.

The BCS could still be used to decided the top 8 or 16.

@Allen: Absolutely, the problem is that there aren’t enough games to get a sufficient statistical sample. As long as there’s enough games played, a playoff is actually redundant (but not as fun not to have one).

Both the BCS and playoffs (in college football) have high failure rates. Playoffs do give the illusion that the failure rate is low, so perhaps that is the way to go.

By: Allen

Allen — Wed, 09 Jan 2008 04:12:27 +0000

Donnie, by your logic, the only true way we can determine the winner would be to do things Tennis style.

That’s where opponents face off to win 5 points, but always by a margin of at least 2.

Of course, the whole season would be required to handle the post season so that’s why it’ll never happen.

Basically, you just need something that people consider to have a low enough of a failure rate that is feasible.

By: Tom

Tom — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 20:59:54 +0000

I would prefer a playoff. I think it 8 or 16 teams. It is not perfect but at least the championship is settled on the field. You would still have to have some sort of ranking or other process to see which teams are included in the playoff and there would always be debates about who deserves to get in but got left out but that would keep things fun.

By: Wahrheit

Wahrheit — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 18:50:06 +0000

I think it’s cool that you’re pointing out the real statistics behind it all…in all the other sports, with best-of-seven series and the like, the “best” team wins a vast majority of the championships, but with the small number of games in football there are going to be some crazy things happening, even with the pros. College needs to do two things before I’ll pay attention again; A) Cut the bowls down by about half. Watching a 6-6 Alabama play just because they’re Alabama instead of, say 8-4 Troy State is so patently unjust that I boycott the bowls. B) It’s idiotic to wait 6-7 weeks between the end of the season and the so-called National Championship game. By then I’ve forgotten what happened during the regular season.

Div. 1-A BCS college football also needs a draft of HS players or something, since it’s just a minor league for the NFL where they don’t have to pay the players, and 15 or 20 schools get all the best players and the others have to fight over the scraps.

Why am I writing so much about something I don’t care about much anymore? Good question–I guess because I was such a big fan as a kid and gradually they lost me. Too bad, because I used to really love the college game.

By: Derek Slater

Derek Slater — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 18:20:49 +0000

128-team double-elimination bracket.

re: “exciting games that have a less than 33% chance of determining the best team”, that’s exactly what people are complaining about with the BCS.

(My secret weapon in this discussion is that I don’t care. At least not until Butch gets UNC to the top of the polls.)

By: Donnie

Donnie — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 16:23:31 +0000

Addendum: I think a four-team playoff is the best idea I’ve seen so far. This would provide a balance of making sure the “true” best team has a chance to play for the title with the risk of playing too many games to make the best team’s victory unlikely.

By: Donnie

Donnie — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 16:01:56 +0000

IMO, the best team would beat other elite teams the greatest percentage of the time. The problem is that they can’t play enough games to determine this with enough accuracy. (We have different ideas as to what makes the “best” team )

This season, Arkansas beat LSU. Arkansas is a solid team, but because we have more regular season data to go on, we can infer LSU is still better and would win the majority of head-to-head matchups. But if that were a bowl game, people would start to think Arkansas really is better than LSU. To me, this is not logical.

If we really wanted a system that would determine the best team, we’d need a (much) longer season to increase the chance that statistical anomalies will be reduced. Every team would need close to the same schedule strength. Whoever has the best record after this huge pseudo-round-robin would be the winner.

For football, this is impractical. So there has to be something else.

Playoffs are exciting, especially the one-and-done type where teams have to win every single game. But the winner is the one who happens to be “on” at the end of the season, or happened to get favorable matchups, or just plain got lucky.

As long as people recognize what they’re getting by advocating a playoff system, I’ve no problem with it. Playoffs provide a set of tense, exciting games that have a less than 33% chance of determining the best team in the league. But most people don’t realize that’s what they’re getting.

By: wang

wang — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 12:15:27 +0000

I’m not for one system or the other. However a playoff is the best way for determining the best team. If we talk about the best it means a lot of things. Sustained superior performance comes first and foremost to mind. Regular season performance gets you home field and the like, but if you are the best then you should beat the rest of the best. If that makes any sense. I know that the “better” team doesn’t always win, but the old cliche states “thats why you play the games”. An old example: Super Bowl 25, I am a diehard Giants fan but on paper the Bills were a better team. I think if they played 10 times the Bills would have won 9 times. They were dangerous and that offense was ridiculous, but on that day the Giants were better.

Just my two cents.