The college football championship game last week left me depressed. Not because of who won and lost, but because I know there won't be any more games for nine months. As such, some thoughts on the recent season and college football as a whole
First, that the College Football Playoff (CFP) system, in which a committee selects four teams for an actual playoff, is a vast improvement upon the previous Bowl Championship Series (BCS), which used an indecipherable computer formula to select teams for a championship game.
With the CFP we at least get three important games to decide the national title (the two semifinals and the championship) instead of just one.
Second, that college football has by far the most exciting, meaningful regular season of any sport.
In professional baseball nobody really cares who wins a particular game because they play 162 of them. The NBA plays 82 games and a seemingly endless best-of-seven playoff schedule that comes close to a second season in itself.
The National Football League (NFL) plays only 16 games (itself a dubious increase over time from 12 and then 14), but it is hard to call any of them crucial when over a third of the teams make the playoffs, and teams with records barely above .500 sometimes end up winning the Super Bowl (think Eli Manning and the New York Giants).
But in college football every game matters from the first week on and with increasing intensity after the CFP rankings come out about two-thirds of the way through. A single loss doesn't end a team's chances but it essentially puts them in single-game elimination thereafter.
Making the CFP is therefore much harder than making the playoffs of any other sport, and that is what makes every Saturday in the fall so special.
The conference championship games also matter in college football because they often represent "play-in" match-ups (in stark contrast to those worthless money-making schemes disguised as conference tournaments in college basketball).
Third, that the CFP committee got it right again with this year's selections--however you twist and turn it, it's hard to deny that Clemson, Oklahoma, Georgia and Alabama deserved their bids (although, given the results of the playoff, their seeding could have been reversed).
Fourth, that however sound the CFP committee's choices were, what happened this year should still add further momentum to the idea of expanding the field to eight teams.
Item No. 1: that the University of Central Florida (UCF) Knights were left out despite being the only undefeated team, and then went on to beat seventh-ranked Auburn in the Peach Bowl.
Item No. 2: that the three Big-Ten teams left out (Ohio State, Wisconsin, and Penn State) were probably as worthy as any of the teams included; indeed, the hunch is that Vegas odds-makers would have made Ohio State favorites over at least two of the CFP teams, while Wisconsin's only loss was by five points to the Buckeyes in the Big-10 title game.
In short, it would have been even more interesting if we'd had an eight-team playoff that included UCF, Ohio State and Wisconsin.
The appeal of such an expanded playoff is only increased when considering that college football goes frustratingly dormant from early December, after the conference championship games, until after Christmas, when we finally get bowl games with teams that deserve to be in bowl games.
In between we get Army-Navy and the Cheribundi Tart Cherry Boca Raton Bowl.
So why not add a CFP quarterfinal round between those conference championship games and Christmas, with the semifinals still somewhere around New Year's and the championship game, as now, a week later?
There would be no "slippery slope" here that would undermine the regular season because bids would be automatically extended to the winners of the "Power Five" conference championships, which this year would have been Oklahoma, Clemson, Georgia, USC, and Ohio State.
There would still be a CFP committee, but their task would be limited to selecting the other three "at large" teams, including at least one from a non-Power Five conference for fun's sake, and seeding the eight for the quarterfinals.
This year that would have meant the selection of UCF as the non-Power Five team and Alabama and Wisconsin as the other two highest ranked at large teams.
The seeding would have likely produced the following match-ups: Clemson-UCF, Oklahoma-USC, Georgia-Wisconsin, and the dream pairing of Alabama-Ohio State.
There is no downside to such a system. It would add excitement to what is now mid-December dead time and reduce the controversy over which teams actually make the playoffs--a committee deciding three at-large teams in a field of eight is a great deal less problematic than picking four at large for a playoff field of four.
Winning your conference would matter because the winners would receive automatic bids, and there would be no complaints about a Power Five champion being left out while another conference got two teams in (as this year, with Alabama and Georgia).
And a beleaguered ESPN would get to broadcast four more big-ratings games.
Or does all that make too much sense?
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial on 01/15/2018