Alright, for you playoff nuts, here’s a real-life exercise for you.
Develop a playoff system.
Easy enough, right? Hell, you’ve probably got 3 or 4 of them sitting on paper napkins somewhere in your office right now. But hold on a second.
Since you can’t just blow up college football and remake it as you see fit, here are some real-world constraints you’d have to work through to put in a playoff system:
Number of Games:
There are 12 regular season games now. Some conferences play a conference championship game, which would increase the number to 13.
You’re going to have a VERY difficult time convincing Presidents, AD’s, coaches, players, etc. to play more than 15 games in a season.
You might be able to convince schools to play only 11 regular season games, but that would be difficult. Every game scrapped is a pretty big revenue stream down the drain for somebody.
For economic reasons, you aren’t going to be able to convince conferences to scrap their Championship games.
So that means that any playoff system must be capped at a maximum of three games per team. (11 games + possible conference title game + 3 playoff games = 15 games. That means only eight total playoff participants for those of you who suck at math.)
One party does not want to play more games, and will not budge. The other does not want to play fewer games, and will possibly budge, but only a very small amount.
That’s problem #1.
Bowls:
Bowls will not accept being semi- or quarter-final sites. They rely on teams bringing half-a-state’s-worth of fans with them when they play. Fans aren’t going to travel en masse all across the country to watch a semi-final, and then do it again one or two weeks later to watch a final.
Does North Carolina bring 50,000 fans to watch their Eight Eight game, and then again for their Final Four game a week later? It wouldn’t happen in football either.
Fan travel would reduce quite a bit under a multi-game playoff system, and that’s a non-starter for bowl games.
Bowls also like to view themselves as end-of-season, week-long extravaganzas, with activities, banquets, trips, and tours for everyone involved. You can do this when teams have a month between games. You can’t do this when one team is going to have to play again next week.
Bowls would be reluctant to reduce themselves to being merely a “stamp” on the game. What exactly would the “Orange Bowl” be other than a fancy name for a semi-final?
Finally, you will not easily just push bowls aside. The larger bowls have supported college football for nearly a century and have poured in literally billions of dollars into the sport. They have bought the right to have their opinions seriously considered.
The larger bowls, especially the Rose Bowl, also have enough money and fan support that you can’t strong arm them into doing anything without taking a severe PR hit among the fans – your cash cows.
So you can’t easily force the bowls to accept a playoff system without a huge cost, and bowls simply will not accept being anything other than a championship game or a free-standing event.
That’s problem #2.
Selection Method:
How are you going to select your teams? How many teams would go?
Where would they play?
Are you going to use polls? A BCS-type system to select teams?
Conference champs + X at-large bids?
How do you handle Mid-Majors?
The current problems with the BCS would not be solved with a relatively small playoff system, and you’re never going to have the large, 64-team style playoff that would.
That’s problem #3.
So rather than bluster, come up with a playoff system that solves these three problems as best as possible.
Challenge my assumptions if you want, but I’m not going out on much of a limb with any of them.
Come up with a playoff system that could be reasonably implemented in the sport as it actually exists in real-life, replete with all of the money-grubbing politics that go on behind the curtains.