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| SJS College Football Extravaganza |
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 4 CounterargumentsSo I'm driving home from work this week and the local sports guys (who have been rambling on about the Washington Redskins since February) actually noticed that the college football season was upon us, and so deigned to talk about it for all of 10 minutes. I'm getting used to that; an NFL fan could say the inverse pretty safely in Gainesville. Not much about college football seems to interest these NFL guys except: 1) who can the Redskins draft, 2) is Florida or Florida State better, and 3) why doesn't college football have a playoff just like the NFL? I've visited the playoff question before, and I'll do so again in my first commentary of 2000. As I grow older (stodgier? more conservative?), I find myself becoming more and more adamantly opposed to a playoff. Maybe that's not so far from my own nature: I'm a traditionalist in other sports. Take baseball. I hated the move to the wild card system, I hated the increase in divisions from 4 to 6, and I am strongly skeptical of interleague play. I think the ball is juiced, and despair that Ralph Kiner and Jimmie Foxx will be forgotten in favor of Carlos Delgado and (choke) Jose Canseco. So maybe I should be a traditionalist in college football, except that my own passion for the sport germinated just 10 years ago, and so it has taken some time for me to soak in what the traditions were. There is a very different mindset between us traditionalists (now calling myself that proudly, even if my idea of tradition is Steve Spurrier not Bear Bryant) and the casual college football fan. Maybe some of that mindset will come out below, as I set up 4 straw men and attempt to knock them down. 1. College football needs a playoff. That is the only way to determine a true national champion; otherwise it is all just opinion. Maybe. In a lot of ways, "champion" always depends on the definition. Most people want it to mean "the best team of the year", but even sports with a playoff don't use that definition. The New York Yankees recently won the World Series after setting the Major League record for wins in a season; but if they had been bounced in the first round of the playoffs, would anyone dispute the fact that they were the best team that year even if they weren't the champion? Were the 1998 Atlanta Falcons really better than the 1998 Minnesota Vikings, even though the Falcons earned the right to be crowned NFC champion? When I played Little League, they used to award a trophy for Regular Season champion (the team with the best record) and Playoff Champion (the team that won the playoffs) -- they do this for college basketball conferences too. We were lucky to win both one year, but if I had to pick one, I'd have to say the Regular Season title was more meaningful, since it was the marathon and the playoffs were the sprint. Besides, college football has a playoff: the BCS. Yes, it only includes two teams, yes, those choices are based in part on opinion polls, but so what? College basketball has a 64-team playoff and there's still plenty of griping about who gets in and who doesn't. And teams that only lose a handful of times still miss the tournament thanks to small-conference prejudice (sometimes justified). Professional hockey and basketball lean toward including everybody, and even in the NFL there are 9-7 teams with a chance to win the Super Bowl. The college "playoff" -- the BCS -- at least has the merits of including two schools that definitely deserve a crack, even if one or two other schools must be left out. Call it Webmaestro's Theorem: In any playoff of n teams, there are always n+3 teams griping that they should be included. So 2, 4, 8, 64 teams-- what does it matter? 2. Playoffs are more exciting than the regular season. Says who? Says NFL fans, for one thing. Not because the playoffs are any great display of football (how many blowout Super Bowls and playoff games have we seen in the past ten or twelve years?), but because their regular seasons are boring. Says baseball fans, whose team can drop a three-game series and not blink, whose stadiums are one sixth full when the doormats come to town or its Tuesday night or there is a bit of a cold breeze from the northwest. But in college football, where (at least in the no-playoff era) every game matters, regular season games often outstrip the playoff atmosphere in other sports. Where else in sports can you go to the second game of the year and scream your heart out and live and die with every play? Ask Tennessee fans, who've done an awful lot of dying in second games this decade. Where else in sports is there a must-win game for someone every single week of the season? Now consider the alternate scenario: 8-1 Florida plays at 8-1 Florida State. The RVs are all decked out, the stands are bedlam... because what's at stake is nothing less than home field advantage in the second round of the playoffs! Snooze. 3. Why should Division I-A be different? Every other sport has a playoff, even Division I-AA football! Well, call me a contrarian, but I am of the belief that different is good. One of my beefs about baseball going to a 6-division, wild-card format is that it is too much like the NFL. I liked the fact that in one sport at least, only the elite few make the playoffs. I like the fact that college baseball (once upon a time) had a straight-up 8 team double-elimination tournament: that's different. I like the way the professional majors are all stroke play while the amateur golfing major is match play. I like the modified Stableford scoring system. I like the fact that the Masters has fast greens, the US Open high rough, the British Open seaside links. I like the way Wimbledon is on grass, the US on hard court, and the French on clay. I like the way hockey lets in everybody. I like the way college basketball has a 64-team battle royal. And I like the fact that Division I-A college football is different. It may displease my sense of order, but I'm a meta-sportsfan. Not only do I like emersing myself in one sport, I like swimming in all sports in a grand experiment to figure out which gives me the most pleasure. (Maybe Matthias knows what the hell I'm talking about.) And I can't complain with the pleasure Division I-A college football has given me. Whenever a sport does something unique, that uniqueness is special and becomes a reason to love that sport more and best. When baseball succombed to interleague play, an everlasting and age-old good was sacrificed for the (admittedly) fun few weekends in the season when the Cubs play the White Sox and the Phillies play the Orioles. If baseball ever homogonizes the designated hitter across leagues, something precious will be lost. And there's a danger there: if college football ever modeled itself after the NFL; if it got rid of the differences between it and the football played by better athletes at a higher level, then how could college football compete with the NFL? Would it become as popular as the baseball minor leagues? Of course, college will always have going for it that alumni will cheer their teams; but it should still protect its uniqueness to maintain the broadest possible appeal. 4. No one pays any attention to the minor bowls anyway. I don't think this is true. I'm a free market guy, politically, and all I see is every year there are new bowls and every year there are more preseason games. Now, obviously the Jeep Aloha Bowl will never garner the ratings of an AFC championship game, and a lot of times the stadiums are only half-full. But the fact of the matter is, corporations keep sponsoring these things, and I keep watching them ardently. The bowls bring us a bunch of non-conference games we would never otherwise get to see. It is a measuring stick for which conferences are the strongest, and it provides an upstart Tulane or Marshall or BYU a chance to play against one of the big boys. The bowls come a few months before NFL draft day, giving the NFL fan a chance to see some of the bigger names at some of the smaller schools for the first time. And for me, the onslaught of bowls heightens the holiday season just like colored lights, the smell of pine, and the taste of hot apple pie. Sure, you see some 8-3 teams square off, but you also get to see Joe Hamilton and Michael Vick and Ron Dayne and Randy Moss and LaDanian Tomlinson. You might even get to see your alma mater if you are like me and live in the wrong "region", or if you are a Virginia alum and would never get to see your team play otherwise. It also gives the mediocre team something to shoot for, and the coach something to seduce recruits with. And in a sport that makes untold millions of dollars on the backs of college kids who see not a single dime of it, who can deny as many of them as possible the reward of a free vacation to Hawaii, Florida, or Arizona? A 16-team playoff would demolish the bowls, which might make ABC and the NCAA a ton of money, but it would take a lot of the fun away from a lot of people. In Conclusion In conclusion, I think a playoff loses us more than it gains us. I think it sacrifices the greater long-term good of the game for the short-term, three-week thrill of a playoff. The things that make college football special and its greatest strengths are the intensity of the regular season and the pageantry and rewards of the postseason. True, it chooses its champion by tortured and unorthodox means, but it does choose a champion and most of the time those choices are hard to argue with. And the percentage of times one can argue with it match up pretty well to the percentage of times some "undeserving" or "lucky" team makes a run in the NFL, NHL, NBA, or college basketball playoffs. The anxiety of choosing which two teams play for the national championship would be traded for the anxiety of which 8 or 16 teams make the playoffs; the only difference in the anxiety is in the former case you are choosing among deserving teams and in the latter undeserving teams. And of course in the latter you are also destroying the bowl games and denying postseason pleasure and reward to alumni and players on another dozen or so teams. You gain the fun and fury of the playoffs and lose the dramatic clashes of the regular season. When so many of these trades come up worse or even in the playoff scenario, I think the choice is rather obvious. Keep the tradition. |
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