The 2008-2009 BCS-FBS National Championship Tournament

I'm sure competitors would love to have a shot at continuing that feeling of winning, too. Not that a playoff is good or bad because half the teams don't get a win, I just think that competitors would value the chance to continue.

 

Please tell me that you're not serious. Please.

You can PM me. I won't tell anyone. I promise.

 

I completely get what you're saying, I just disagree with you but don't care so much that I would get into a line by line forum war. I've got better things to do than invest that much time.

Anyway, the whole problem with voters picking the #1 and #2 is that there's often a lot of ambiguity in the top several teams and there's not enough separation to say "yes, these are definitely the top 2 teams".

Sometimes (2005) it works. This year, where you've got 9 teams with either undefeated or with 1 loss, it doesn't. Especially with the whole UT/OU/TT circular defeat thing. Hell, the Sagarin rankings say OU is #1 and UT is #2, but UT gets screwed because of their timing of their defeats.

And I'm sure every player on the planet would rather have their destiny determined by the randomness of playoffs than the randomness of schedule makers or the biases of voters. It's got to suck for Utah/Boise St to know that no matter what they do, they'll never have the opportunity to play for the championship.

 

You have a chance to earn what you deserve during the regular season. If you want a chance at the title, win more then.

Very rarely is there any ambiguity about which two teams most deserve to play for a championship. You can certainly debate about whether you think Texas is better than Oklahoma, but it's an indisputable fact that Oklahoma did substantially better against a tougher schedule than Texas did against theirs.

You're full of shit, as usual. SI just did their stupid hypothetical playoff and people overwhelmingly picked OU and Florida as the top two teams. The experts have as well. Now if you change the question from "most deserving" to "could Team X beat Team Y?" then that's when you get a lot of uncertainty, but that's a trap question because many teams could beat Oklahoma or Florida. They probably wouldn't, but upsets happen in sports. And the need to distinguish yourself is the only reason that powerhouse teams are actually playing good non-conference opponents these days when it used to be that they would never do it.

Like I said, people play the lottery because of the irrational belief that they're going to win. We've had 69 years of NCAA tournaments and the biggest underdog to claim the championship was Villanova. They're better off taking the victories they can get, rather than being exploited for TV viewers.

 

under the current system I totally agree. And while I don't have a vested interest in whether there's a playoff system, and the rankings will have to come from some form of subjectivity, I don't think there's a team assembled at the college level that would say "no, we don't want to continue playing under the guise of possibly losing." That's against the competitive spirit in any form.

 

I'm sure the players on Hawaii thought they could compete with Georgia too. Irrational beliefs are not really my concern.

 

and they're not a reason to go toward a playoff either, but guarding against a loss because of an upset win really doesn't enter in either. That was my point. I'm sure Boise St would have no problem chancing a blowout loss along the way to have a shot at playing in.

I think one problem with college football is that they seem to be saddled with this stigma that losing one football game all year is catastrophic to championship aspirations, where other sports do offer some amount of chance if you happen to slip up once, and a playoff would negate some of that, but I'm not really for it or against it.

 

Texas won just as many games as OU and FL did, and it's one loss was indisputably "better" than FL's.

1) "Experts" are full of crap, just like the "experts" on ESPN picked PIT over TEN 6-2.

2) You can't seriously be throwing out the unwashed masses ("people") as credence to your claims

3) Nobody is talking about the 24th ranked team running the table - but are you really saying there's no way a USC could win vs FL? Or TX couldn't be OU?

Oh wait, they did.

But anyway, neither of us are going to change the others mind, so let's drop it.

 

You don't know Collin very well, do you?

 

Again, I'm more concerned with reality than irrational beliefs. The reality is that a lot of kids and families walk away from the college bowl season feeling great. Meanwhile almost everyone who participates in the NCAA basketball tournament ends up feeling like shit.