If the “college football leadership council” leaked the document on options for postseason reform published today by USA TODAY Sports as some public demonstration of their infinite genius, consider it a massive miscalculation.
The document outlines the broad strokes of what appear to be the four main avenues conference commissioners are mulling for the sport after the latest BCS deal draws to a close in 2013. Three are pretty blase: keep the current system, but eliminate limits on conference invitations and automatic-qualifying status; a “plus-one” in which the two title game participants are picked after the bowls; and a four-team playoff with seeded semifinals and a championship game.
But, of course, there’s a fourth – infuriating – option aimed at preserving the precious sanctity of the Rose Bowl, which the Pac-12 and Big Ten continue to cling to like old farts covet an early-bird special coupon. Under this scenario, the championship would be determined by… Hell, I’ll let Steve Weiberg of USA TODAY explain it:
“… the four highest-ranked teams at the end of the regular season would meet in semifinals unless the Big Ten or Pac-12 champion, or both, were among the top four. Those leagues’ teams still would meet in the Rose, and the next highest-ranked team or teams would slide into the semis. The national championship finalists would be selected after those three games.”
So every time a Pac-12 or B1G team ended up in the top four at the end of the regular season, we’d end up with some bizarre Franken-playoff consisting of six teams that aren’t really seeded (I guess). In case that doesn’t just intuitively sound stupid to you, let’s consider how this defeats the purpose of the playoff reforms in the first place.
First, if one of the objectives here is to shorten the postseason in terms of actual calendar time, it would be nearly impossible to do so under this scenario. Presumably this would mean playing the Rose Bowl no sooner than its traditional New Year’s Day slot, which means the earliest you could hold the championship game would be Jan. 8.
Second, as unfathomable as it may seem to us now, what if the Pac-12 and B1G contestants are the two top-ranked teams at the end of the regular season? Once they square off in the Rose Bowl, the winner has to play another game to win the title? (This is also an issue with the “original” plus-one idea, in my mind, but I don’t want to digress.)
Lastly, one of the major objections to the BCS has been its lack of transparency. This possible six-team playoff just throws a layer of unnecessary complexity on what is intended to be a simple, accessible structure.
Obviously Jim Delany and Larry Scott value my opinion about as much as they do Boise State’s, but here goes anyway: Four teams, three games (preferably using teams’ home fields). That’s it.
That’s it.
