A College Football Playoff? Say it Ain’t so!
If you have not yet read my colleague Dan Levine’s piece on this topic, check it out here. He describes the feelings held by most…well, most people with a heartbeat.
Unfortunately for him and for all of you who agree, he is wrong. It happens to the best of us. There is no shame in being wrong. It happened to me once, back in the 90’s. I think it was a Tuesday. Anyway, the College football powers that be in making a playoff imminent seems like a fool’s errand. They are destroying the one advantage they have over every other major American sport going.
All you average sports fans, real quick, a quiz for you: who won the Big 12 basketball regular season title this past season? It happened literally within the past few months. You are thinking to yourself it was probably Kansas but it might have been Missouri…or did Baylor pull it out? You want to know the answer? The answer is: it doesn’t matter. It never matters. Nothing in the regular season of college basketball ever matters. The same goes for Major League Baseball, the NBA and don’t even get me started on hockey. Could the regular season possibly mean LESS than it does in the NHL? It’s almost a secretly, well concocted joke at this point.
It is debatable whether the NFL regular season is important. It matters because you have to make the playoffs but ask the New York Giants if they felt like they were the best team during this past year’s regular season. College football has a monopoly on the Regular Season and that should mean something.
As amateur football currently stands in division one, every game means the world from week one through December. If you want to get serious for a minute and think about it, with the exception of the teams in the literal National Championship game in January, every other team’s LEAST important game is actually their bowl game. It means squat.
So instead of banking on this week after week excitement, college football wants to turn to a playoff system, relegating the regular season to something between what the NFL currently offers us and what the NHL drags out claiming to be professional hockey. No longer will that awesome November weekend game between top teams matter as much. A team eliminating itself from title contention with a single loss will be a thing of the past. The pressure and subsequently the will of the best players to perform at their peak execution game after game will dissipate. College football will become…normal. And I for one would hate to see that happen.
