Playoffs? We don't need no stinking playoffs!

This blog was written by John Brown.  It in no way represents the thoughts or beliefs of  "Belly Up to the Bar" or  The Nathan Brown Show".  Any views represented are those of John and John alone, except anything that is clever I will take all the credit for that.  Continue to live like no one is watching and Monday's bowl picks will be posted in the Morning.  Now without any further ado......

It is the end of the  college football season, which means that my interest in sports is waning.  I won't watch Sportscenter, or ESPN at all, for the next seven months unless women's volleyball or soccer is on.  I keep hearing fans and pundits and writers yelling "We need a playoff!"  Pshaw I say to that.

I watch college football all season for one reason:  it is exciting all season.  It is the only sport that remains exciting from beginning to end.  NFL football is crap.  College and professional basketball are boring.  (That is more a flaw of the game of basketball than it is any ranking system.)  Baseball is like a five hour barbed wire enema.  We don't need a playoff system taking away from the excitement of the game.  I like that a game in week one is just as important to your postseason hopes as your twelfth game of the season.  I like that when teams like Oregon State and Appalachian State beat you, it matters.  If anyone were to get beat by the Lions right now in the NFL it wouldn't make a big difference in the playoff picture (unless you are the Cowboys, Jets, Chargers, or Eagles).  I like that a game being played on the other side of the nation has an impact on your standing.  I like that in the past decade or so that the BCS has existed there have been more one versus two than in the eight decades before that.

I used to be a proponent of a playoff system.  Now, I'm not so sure.  All a playoff system does is prove that on any given Saturday (or Thursday, or Friday, or Wednesday even) you are better than the guy on the opposite sidelines, which is enough during the season, but doesn't sit right with me during the post season if an Oklahoma team gets beat by whoever won the Sunbelt this year.  I used to think that you should take the eleven champions of Div 1A (fuck you, I will not call it FBS) conferences and three wild cards and make a fourteen team playoff.  This would do away with the Independents, but fuck them.  If you want a shot at the title you need to join a conference.  Change the game to a ten game season and if you don't have a conference championship, you sure as fuck better play everyone everyone in your conference.  The main reason that I'm not a supporter of this idea is that you still can't solve, fairly, who the three wild cards would be.  Would it be the teams with the best records?  Would it be the top three in the national standings that were not conference champions (my personal favorite)?  I couldn't ever get fully behind the idea without thinking I was jumping on a "Fuck the BCS!" bandwagon.

So how do we get rid of the bullshit and still keep the game exciting?  Make bowls mean something again.  You can play in a bowl game with a .500 record! That's retarded.  If you can barely win half your games you have no business being in a bowl.  (I'm looking at you Vanderbilt, Florida Atlantic, Memphis, Hawaii, Northern Illinois, North Carolina State, and Kentucky.)  I'm a big fan of the idea that if  you have more than three losses you shouldn't be playing in a bowl game.  (But I am usually a big fan of my ideas.) Make a bowl placement prestigious.  If you didn't have every no name team with six or seven wins playing a post season game, there would be far less outcry about the fairness of the championship decision.

But that wouldn't stop the outcry would it.  Part of the call for a change comes because of the selection process for number one and two.  You have biased coaches and media polls and an unbiased computer ranking.  I have two theories on fixing this.  First, and my favorite: Do away with the media poll.  This gives even weight to the other two standings.  The coaches who know the game of football, and, generally, can judge a team's talent and a good win versus a bad win, would be given their due.  The computers who don't play football would be weighted equally because they rate things regardless of bias.  Second theory.  Do away with the human polls completely and base everything off the computer rankings.  This isn't practical, because, well very simply, computers don't play football.

All of the whining and such aren't going to change much though, not unless you can figure out a way to keep the BCS coordinators rolling around in stripper money.  The money is what it really comes down to, which is a shame.  All of my theories, like the playoff theories, change the fatness of the back wallet.  To all of those big endorsers of a playoff system: think what you would be giving up.  I don't want a boring game that only matters in December ( a la March Madness).  I want a sublime game where people knock the shit out of each other for higher education.