| I will give some credence to the argument made up there by SportsGuy that any playoff, whether it is 16, 12, 8, or even 4 teams, will lessen the importance of the regular season. College Football is the one unique entity in sports where you can't have a subpar regular season, get hot at playoff time, and win the championship. Sure, it would be possible, especially if there were 12 or 16 teams, that an underachieving team with lots of talent, like Florida, Ohio St, Alabama, Texas, etc. could lose 2 or 3 games during the season, but get players healthy, get hot, and maybe catch a favorable matchup or two and roll to a championship. This would not be unlike the Ravens, Steelers, Colts, or Giants winning the Super Bowl when they were clearly not among the top 2 teams in the league in the regular season. The 97 or 03 Marlins and the 06 Cardinals would also have been sitting home watching other teams play the World Series if MLB simply picked the two best teams like the BCS (ideally) does. The main problem with the system is not the Boise St or TCU of the moment, in my opinion the bigger problem is that there exists the possibility to have 3 or 4 undefeated teams and no clear way to decide who the best 2 are. This happened in 2004 with USC, Oklahoma, and Auburn all 12-0, a near repeat of 2003 when Oklahoma, LSU, and USC were all 11-1. No matter what your feelings are on the non-BCS schools like TCU, Utah, and Boise St, there is no rational argument that can be made that one of the top 3 from 2004 did not deserve a chance to play for the championship. I don't mind as much when one 1-loss team gets chosen over another, because they had their chance, and they lost a game which could have let them into the championship, but when 3 or more teams play major conference schedules and win every game, there needs to be a system that allows them all a chance to prove whether or not they are the best. |