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A blog wherein a literary agent will sometimes discuss his business, sometimes discuss the movies he sees, the tennis he watches, or the world around him. In which he will often wish he could say more, but will be obliged by business necessity and basic politeness and simple civility to hold his tongue. Rankings are done on a scale of one to five Slithy Toads, where a 0 is a complete waste of time, a 2 is a completely innocuous way to spend your time, and a 4 is intended as a geas compelling you to make the time.

Friday, January 1, 2010

The Passion of the Playoff

So it's New Year's, college football bowl day.

Time for more articles about why we need a college football playoff.

Please!

The basic argument for a playoff follows from a silly premise, that we must have a clear #1 team at the end of the season. Do we have to? Why? It's college football, it's a game, it's not waiting for white smoke to emerge in Vatican City.

And then it says that we can't have a legitimate #1 when the game that determines the legitimate #1 might have participants that are chosen with any element of arbitrariness or doubt. It can only be by having 4 teams, or 8 teams, or some # of teams, in the playoff system.

But, um, excuse me. We argue over the 2 top teams to play in a championship game. If we have a 4-team playoff then we can all agree on the top 2 teams. But why does anyone -- anyone -- believe that we won't just be moving the arbitrariness and the debates and the arguments and the lack of clarity down to determining which team should be the 4th team in or the 8th team in. The NCAA basketball tourney has 64 teams for goodness sakes, and that doesn't stop the arguments over whether some team in the next 4 shouldn't have really been the #16 seed in the eastern regional.

And of course, any team can beat any other team on any given day. So what happens when the #4 team or the #8 team upsets the #1 team? You mean to tell me we're not going to have a running of the sports columnists to explain why the playoff victory doesn't really mean that the #1 team isn't still the #1 team.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

The solution is simple: Pac-10 vs. WAC (Holiday), Mountain West vs. Big 12 (Cotton), Big Ten vs. Big East (Florida somewhere), SEC vs. ACC (Orange). Holiday/Cotton winners in the Rose, Orange/Florida winners in the Sugar (both on New Year's day), a week later the championship in the Fiesta.

This would have resulted in the following playoff if adopted this year; Oregon/Boise State, TCU/Texas, Ohio State/Cincinnati, and Alabama/Georgis Tech. Soryy Florida, no conference championship, no BCS game.

There, problem solved! - db