An Alternate Look at a College Football Playoff

If you're a college football fan, it's either been a fun week or an infuriating one. Monday I put up my final playoff seedings for the Death to the BCS playoffs just before the BCS unveiled their pairing for their big bowls and the elitists started whining about undeserved bids or teams getting screwed over. In my happiness for a school like Northern Illinois getting to go to Miami for the Orange Bowl, I needed to have a calm resolve that deep down, yes, there were other teams that deserved an in to play in some big games. Which is, again, why we need a playoff sooner and better than the one in the works for 2014.

Obviously if you've been reading COAS over the course of its lifespan, you'll know I am a major advocate of a college football playoff at the highest level. For the most part my arguments have come from Death to the BCS, but in the interests of reading another perspective/needing something to do on the train to and from work, I bought a book by Scott Galloway called It's Possible! Realignment And Playoffs-College Football's Opportunity. In it, he outlines a much more radical system for deciding a national champion on the field.

Personally, I think his system is a double-edged sword. I like his ideas about conference realignment, something else that has been rampant in recent years. Instead of the conferences being all about money, he aligns everyone geographically, trying to get teams from the same state in one conference as much as possible. Not only does it make for more travel sense (in sports beyond just football) it would also liven up football in some of these "mid-major" schools by forcing traditional powers to visit them every other year (for example, Alabama visiting in-state school Troy). Obviously, the powers that be would not like getting rid of their current arrangement due to greed and a sense of pride or elitism, depending on how you look at it. I do think the sport would benefit from this, however.

On the other end of the spectrum is his actual playoff format. If you can see close enough in the image above, you will see his cover includes a 32 team playoff bracket. In the context of his new system, the FBS teams are split up into 16 conferences (as described above) where the top 2 teams from each conference make the postseason. Depending on how you determine these conference champions, this system may have a problem (he doesn't explicitly say if it's by conference record or by overall record). If it's purely by conference record, you basically have a system like now where teams can schedule weak outside of their conferences with no reprecussions. Overall record would probably be a better indicator if you can keep other teams' schedules similar (like the NFL does). College football supposedly has the best regular season because it's "the most meaningful" or "every game matters", even though the reality is far from that. We want to maintain this (which is where I think the Death to the BCS system does a pretty good job. Not winning your conference isn't a death blow since you can grab an at-large berth). I also think 32 is too many, though percentage wise it would still be a smaller number of teams playing for the title than the four major pro leagues (33% for the MLB, 37.5% for the NFL, and over half of the NBA and NHL).

On the whole though, it is a system that makes you think, and in some respects definitely makes sense. It is a book I would recommend as it's a quick read, but a good one and makes some pretty persuasive arguments. I'd imagine Kirk Herbstreit would still be off his rocker about it, but there seems to be a fun aspect to that now. Especially in DeKalb.