That's all well and good and nice and everything, but the problem is larger than that. In fact, there are serious problems with attempting to put a playoff system into place. In fact, a playoff system in college football would be an unmitigated disaster.
One of the problems that people have with college football, when they first come to it, is understanding the bowl system. It has been said, quite correctly I might add, is that nobody would build a system like this. Whenever someone creates a sport, such as MLS soccer, they install a playoff system. However, college football was not designed to be so complex. It ended up that way.
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Let us consider a mountain. We all like them, since they are pretty. However, nobody would build a mountain. Why? Because they are poorly designed. They take up a lot of space that cannot be used to build housing developments, they interrupt international trade, and they are often placed inconveniently far from major metropolitan areas that would be able to reap their recreational benefits, such as mountatin climbing, skiing, what have you. Besides, they were built out in the countryside, they are way too tall to be useful, and they don't have wheelchair access.
While mountains were just pushed up in seemingly random locations across the globe, skyscrapers are actually much better. They have elevators, they are right in the cities, and they -- unlike mountains -- provide plenty of office space that will help the economy and provide jobs. Nobody builds mountains, unless they are made out of landfills, which are not conveniently located right near major metropolitan areas either. Thus, people build skyscrapers, while we end up with mountains. The same thing with other sports and college football.
Now then, how did we end up with the current format of college football? The process was, in fact, evolutionary. And evolution creates things that are very durable. However, it also creates things that are very mutable. Does this sound like any particular sport we know?
College football is constantly changing even as it remains very rigid. The season is lengthened every so often, conferences shift around as teams find new alliances, dynasties come and go, teams take the spotlight and disappear from it, and bowl games appear and disappear. However, some teams consistently stay near the top of the heap from year to year, some bowls have endured through the ages, and traditions were built that have barely changed from one decade to the next. And the strange part about all this permanence is that it is built on a sport whose players are constantly changing from year to year.
The first bowl game was, of course, the Rose Bowl. It was created by the city of Pasadena in order to have a sporting event to go along with their Tournament of Roses. In fact, the Tournament of Roses existed before the Rose Bowl and they were merely looking for something to add to it. Their idea was to add a game between two college football teams in order to add a little something to all the other events that were going on at the time. The first Rose Bowl was held on January 1, 1902 and Michigan beat the snot out of Stanford, and the Tournament of Roses committee decided to have chariot races instead. Which they did until January 1, 1916, when the Rose Bowl returned and stayed there. In the interim, three Bacardi Bowl games were played in Havana, Cuba. Those games in 1907, 1910 and 1912 were the only bowl games between Rose Bowls. However, Cuba is a long drive and, presumably, those games were not as well attended as the Rose Bowls.
With the return of the Rose Bowl and the subsequent interest in it, other communities held their own bowl games. But none of them caught on until the Sugar and Orange Bowls after the 1934 season and the Cotton Bowl after the 1935 season. From there, bowl games sprouted up across the country.
The thing you must understand about the growth of bowl games is that they were evolutionary changes. Cities saw how bowl games brought money into the local economy and they wanted a piece of the pie. However, nobody in their right mind would want to take their winter vacation to go to Cleveland for the Great Lakes Bowl, Dayton for the Aviation Bowl, New York City for the Gotham Bowl, or New Jersey for the Garden State Bowl. For that matter, nobody wants to go to Houston at any time of the year for any reason, so the Oil Bowl was pretty well screwed too.
Now then, as the bowl system was building, the poll system was also being created, with the first AP poll coming out in 1936. This was the brainchild of a sports editor who wondered who the best team was in the country and how he could determine that. Of course, his idea was to ask people who actually reported on college football in order to get their insight into the matter and the AP poll was born. A few years later, in 1950, another man had the idea that coaches were the people to ask, and the UPI coaches' poll was created, later to become the USA Today/CNN poll and then the Coaches' Poll we know today. In fact, the coaches' poll was the first poll to take the bowl game into account, while the AP didn't put much stock into those mere exhibition games until 1968 onward. Thus, the opinions of experts were considered valuable gauges of the quality of teams and they were used to crown national champions. However, the only trophy they got for a long time was the trophy from their bowl game or their conference championship, if any.
Fast forward to the late '80's/early '90's. In those years, there were several poll problems and teams were complaining that they deserved to be #1 as much as any other 9-3 team and more than the 11-1 teams. This was particularly exacerbated by the 1990 season, when Colorado and Georgia Tech split the title after a very wild and wooly year in which #1 was traded around between several teams. Thus, the Bowl Alliance was created in order to match up the #1 and #2 teams.
The Bowl Alliance did not start off well. The PAC-10 and Big Ten were not a part of it, so Miami(FL) and Washington split the title in 1991. Of course, people were up in arms that these teams didn't meet each other, preventing people from figuring out who was the best team in the country. Thus, there was a call for the PAC-10 and Big Ten to join the national title race. The calls for a Big Ten membership were, admittedly, not all that fantastic at the time though, since the Big Ten pretty well sucked.
With all that going on, the idea of a playoff also came into being. This was, in my own estimation, particularly aggravated by the fact that Florida State won a national title in 1993 after losing to eventual #2 Notre Dame, thanks to the fact that FSU refused to play Notre Dame again in a bowl. Instead, they decided to just play in the Orange Bowl against Nebraska. Needless to say, this cheesed a few people off.
Eventually, the BCS came into being, creating a very complex method for choosing the two teams that will meet for a national title. Since the AP, foot-draggers that they are, said that their jobs were to report the news, not make it, they forced the BCS to look at things other than just the human polls. This partial nod to journalistic ethics forced the BCS to add computer polls to their human polls and enlarge the equation that would compute the #1 and #2 teams in the country.
This is the way things stand today. The equations have changed over the years as new information is added and new events force the BCS to react to last year's results, but the bowl system has survived, the regular season is still king and playoffs are not even on the radar, except when sportswriters attempt to browbeat college football into creating a playoff system, allowing sportswriters to create the news, which they are not supposed to do.
Now that we understand how things ended up the way that they are, let us think about what it all means.
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