Yes, that's right. My answer is, "And...???" Which is to say, "What is your point?"
Let's think about one thing for a while: this is a sport. A game. A bit of entertainment. It is something we watch because we enjoy it. We do not watch it to cure cancer, we do not watch it to end hunger, we watch it because it brings us joy. And, in this enjoyable game, college football places a premium on every single game rather than a playoff system. Is this concept of being fair to deserving teams rather than giving second or third chances to teams that blew it earlier really that hard to accept?
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At the end of the season, let's look at what the bowl season really does. Rather than having 1 champion and 64 losers (there is a play-in game, remember?) like we have in the NCAA baskeball tournament, we have 28 champions. That's 28 bowl champions. Las Vegas Bowl champions, Insight Bowl Champions, Cotton Bowl champions and even one national champion. Is that such a bad thing? Is letting these kids who groan and sweat and hurt and ache every Saturday have one last go-round for the chance at a trophy really all that bad? Is letting these kids go someplace on vacation and enjoy a week away for winter break really a detriment to the sport? Is allowing the university to give their players -- who are funding the rest of the university's sports -- a few track suits and sweatshirts as gifts in exchange for considerably reducing their life expectancy really a bad thing for the game?
I'll admit that college football players are pampered a lot, but I can understand the reasons why. After all, they entertain us -- just like musicians, actors, dancers and artists. Do I think they should be paid? No. They are already recompensed very well for their efforts, thanks to the fact that they don't have to pay back thousands of dollars in student loans used to pay for their tuition. But, after all is said and done, half of the teams that enter the postseason are allowed to return to their dorm rooms as champions... and that is a sport that truly treats its 18-22 year old players well.
For all the talk of playoffs being the way that everyone else determines their champion, isn't there something to be said for a sport that actually does something different? A sport that stands out from the others and dares to not fit in? Since when did conformity equal quality? I thought we were supposed to celebrate differences rather than stamp them out.
The call for a playoff system is just another example of how people cannot accept anything that is somehow different. College football is different. Why not enjoy that rather than attempt to destroy a venerable institution that remains enormously popular despite the fact that it actually goes through the trouble of standing out from the crowd?
The non-playoff bowl system is an institution that works for college football because it came into being and thrived on its own. It hasn't been blown up and replaced because there isn't a need to blow it up and replace it.
What makes me say that? Because college football is shown on about a dozen different channels every Saturday. Because 110,000 people means empty seats in Michigan Stadium. Because Mississippi can sell out their stadium every week, even when their team stinks. Because sponsoring a bowl game provides a city with substantial to enormous revenues every year. Because when the Ohio Bobcats beat a team from a BCS conference (even a bad one), it makes national headlines. Because people hang on every poll as soon as it is released on Sunday. Because people get excited for upcoming out-of-conference matchups in March. Because every game always matters and bragging rights last for an entire year.
College basketball needed a playoff because nobody cared about college basketball in 1939. So the NCAA put something together and it grew from there. Playoffs are for sports that need some excitement, while college football has excitement every week. When Division I-A college football is dying and it needs to gather the attention of the nation again, it will have a playoff. But to break apart something as complexly beautiful as the current system is to destroy the reason that the college football is the giant that it is. To want a playoff system is to not want college football.
Why do I say this? Because the NBA playoffs don't interest much of anybody. Nobody fills out brackets for the NBA playoffs, but they will sweat over their NCAA brackets like there is no tomorrow. They make their selections, they carefully pick their teams, and they stress over every game. Yet the NBA playoffs are, quite honestly, much more fair than the NCAA playoffs. Teams get 5 or 7 games in which to prove they are more worthy than the teams they are playing, so an individual game does not have the exceptional, do-or-die weight of an NCAA tournament game. Whereas, in the NCAA tournament, one bad shooting night can leave a deserving team exiting the dance against a team that shouldn't even be on the same floor. Yet the NCAAs generate a heck of a lot more excitement than the NBA playoffs because they are actually unfair to good teams.
The difference is that things are simply different in college. If you want playoffs that are close to fair, you watch the NBA. If you want a sequence of games over a few weeks that are played for a steadily increasing number of marbles, you watch college basketball or the NFL. But if you want a sequence of games over the course of three months where every single game is played for a varying -- but usually increasing -- number of marbles, you watch college football. And, in case you had not noticed, a lot of people do that very thing, as they have done for well over a century.
Big-time college football is not any other sport. It is simply itself. It is a sport that grew in the ways that it needed to grow. Will it have a playoff eventually? I don't doubt it. When college football has fallen off the map and has been supplanted by other sports, there will be a playoff system to give it one last hurrah before it fades into irrelevance. All things change, after all. But creating a playoff just to try to fit in with everyone else is to rip apart everything that makes the sport so frustrating, so fascinating, and so exciting for its fans from September to January.
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