Moving toward a playoff?

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Here’s an interesting article for those – which includes everyone, I’m guessing – tired of waiting for a playoff in college football.

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About Jill Painter

Jill Painter is a sports columnist for the Los Angeles News Group, covering everything from the Dodgers, Lakers, Clippers, USC, UCLA, Kings, golf and all human interest stories in sports.
  • amm

    i am vehemently opposed to a playoff. It will ruin the tradition and pagentry of college football.

  • UCLA ’64

    With its selection committee plan, how will this Utah plan be any more accurate than what now exists? Dumb.

    The simplest thing to do is change the name from the Bowl Championship Series to the Bowl Championship System and keep the rest the same. The ultimate winner would be called the Bowl Champion. Everyone would know what it means, and Congress wouldn’t have to write a law forbidding the use of the name, “National Champion.”

    This Utah-Boise State nonsense will destroy the bowl games.

    My preference is to let the BCS contracts run out and then go back to the bowl system. The BCS was created to eliminate arguments, but look at what we have … endless carping about it.

  • amm

    i’m only 15 but i know a little something about the history of college football

  • Sal C

    Who cares? The people want to see a true champion. Screw the bowls. Would Kobe Bryant want to score 102 points in a game or win the game? Same rules. I’ll take the game and I’ll take the champion. Bring on the playoffs. Next!

  • Anonymous

    Sal C. — The whole point of what the “old” people said is that there never will be a “true champion.” Utah is proposing a committee of people select the top 12 teams for a playoff. That’s not a “true championship” tournament. It’s less than what we have now and much less than what the bowl system was.

    There are 120 Div. 1A teams. After 12 regular season games — where a lot of teams play no one but a bunch of cream puffs — how on earth does some committee select the top 12 teams? Plus, people will forever quarrel with the committees picks and seedings. Nothing will change.

    Plus, the college presidents and A.D.s won’t go along with extending the college football season.

    If you’re old enough to read more than ten words at a time, read the linked article in its entirety, without skipping the big words, and read some other articles on the Internet.

  • Ri-L

    “The people want to see a true champion.” Bull puckey. The real truth is that very few want to see a playoff system attempt to determine a “real” champion. Even in basketball, can we truly say that the very best team always wins the tourney? No. In a system that eliminates a team after only one loss, a single off day can spell disaster. Truly – were the NY Giants a better team than the Pats? But yet, they are the Super Bowl Champions. That’s fine – they are the champions, but it’s ridiculous to say that they were the best team that year. Recognizing that we will never have a perfect system, then we need to find the “best” system. I contend that having 32 Bowl Champions is a better system. Rather than arguing about the BCS system, we can go back to arguing about the AP/Coaches poll system. In the meantime, we have 32 schools that go home a champion. The Poulan Weed Eater Bowl champion! The Rose Bowl champion! We’ve decimated even the very best bowls to also ran status – how disappointed was SC this year to have to go the Rose Bowl? Instead of a triumph, it became a consolation prize. That’s pitiful. The college basketball season has become a ho-hum affair because none of it really matters until the tourney. We should go back to letting teams go home a winner in their bowl game, and keeping up our arguments about who truly was the best team.

  • Anonymous

    Why do Bruins care about football National Championships?

  • MadDog Bruin

    While I don’t particularly enjoy the current system, it really troubles me that the government feels the need to stick its nose in this. Is there nothing that these arrogant fools don’t want to control?

    Look at what the government has taken over or wants to take over. I’m amazed that no one has commented on the attempted government intrusion into another area of our lives. They are clearly drunk with power.

  • cv

    If you want a true champion you have to first fix the regular season. The Utah and Boise’s are going to cut off their own nuts if they drop the BCS and go back to the bowls.

  • Trojan_SF

    MadDog – I completely agree with you! This is not about fixing the BCS, but about government usurping individual freedoms and responsibilities.

  • Bruin Zealot

    I have to disagree. Government is stepping in because college presidents are too greedy to change. They are unwilling to compromise and change to allow non-BCS schools access to the better bowls. The BCS is a monolopy. For those who don’t want change, I think you can keep your tradition and allow for a playoff system. Incorporating the bowls into such a system I think will make the bowl games that much more appealing. As it stands now, unless our team is in a particular bowl, do we really care what happens in most bowl games? I think most people only care about the National Championship game. The lesser bowl games will still exist because they will the 3rd, 4th,etc. place teams, which don’t qualify for playoffs. Here’s hoping change does happen and not just smoke being blown up our…

  • Sal C

    Odds are that the true champion is one of those 12 teams in the playoff. I like those chances a whole lot better than the one available now. So the #13 team in the country gets shut out. So what? Don’t be the #13 team in the country and win more games.

  • mike chat

    amm

    For a 15 year old, you are really smart.

    The government does not need to get involved. The bowl games are fun, at the end sometimes it is clear who the best is, sometimes not. If we have a playoff, sometimes it is clear who the best is, sometimes not. What the rosebowl needs to do is drop the big 10.

  • cyberdbk

    Stop arguing how a true champion should be determined because no matter how you do it, USC will claim they are the true champions and that they deserve it!!!

  • gubon13

    What’s wrong with the simplicity of the +1 game? It adds ONE game to the entire season. It only extends the season for two teams.

    Who loses? Sure, two BCS bowls becomes *slightly* less important, but this argument loses ground when you consider that they did the same thing to the other BCS bowls when they said that one site would also host the national championship game.

    But what if you’re not one of the top 4 teams? Tough. Top 12…top 8…top 4… The line has to be drawn somewhere and I’m happy with 4 teams – if for no other reason than that it’s not just 2. Sure, it’ll still be a subjective decision to choose the top 4 teams, a process that will be prone to controversy.

    And sure, someone will complain each year, but then, that’s what sports people do.

  • Warren

    Ri-L,
    By that logic, why bother having a national championship game? If the Pats were the best team (based on their regular season record), then maybe we should have crowned them after the regular season instead of having a Super Bowl. I also haven’t heard anyone complain that the current NFL system of playoffs (which is only 4 more games) is unfair because it is one-and-done.

    The whole season is one-and-done, pretty much. For many teams, if you lose one game, your shot at playing for the National Championship is over (just ask Texas). On top of that, most conferences have a conference championship, which if I remember correctly is 1 game to determine whether or not they get into the BCS.

    If they are going to use the BCS to determine the 2 teams who play in the championship game, they can use the BCS to determine the top 12 (although I personally would prefer a top 8), and then play the single-elimination games.

  • cv

    12 teams gives you and odd number of games?

  • BruinGuy

    Some anonymous bonehead said: “Why do Bruins care about football National Championships?”

    That’s the equivalent of saying, “why do people in L.A. watch NFL football.”

    Bonehead, I tell ya.

  • bz

    I came into the comments section to lament that I feel like I’m the only one left in the US to like the bowl system…. I am glad to see there is a quiet group of like minded people. Long live the bowl games!!!

  • Mike H class of 90

    Right now we have a playoff, but it’s a 2 team playoff. It would be great to expand that beyond 2, but I think a committee would be a bad idea. We would be back to having regional biases and big school/conference biases to determine the additional teams. We already have that now with voting systems that incorporate human voters into a large part of the BCS standings. What we need is a system that rewards winners of each conference with a berth in the playoffs and create the conferences accordingly.