Until 2014, the College Football Playoffs consisted simply of the two top ranked teams playing in the BCS (Bowl Championship Series) National Championship Game. This is different than almost every other major sports league, college or professional. Almost every major sports league has a multi-tiered playoff system in which teams get multiple rounds to prove their worth. This is where college football differs. Instead of having multiple rounds of playoffs to earn your right at a championship, a team must have a virtually perfect season to make it to the one playoff game that also happens to be the championship game.
It is clear to me and many other people that there should be a better playoff system that gives other teams an opportunity to win. We will look at the NCAA basketball tournament finishes in order to compare the two. In the last twenty years, eight of the teams that won were not number one seeds going into the tournament. In the college football playoff system, these teams would not have had a shot at being the champion or even playing in the National Championship. There’s just something about a regular season record that doesn’t tell the whole story. Maybe your team just started gaining chemistry towards the end of the season. Maybe you had some crucial injuries in the first part of the season which led to a record that wasn’t representative of your team’s actual skill. Another good part of the NCAA basketball tournament is that it gives chances to teams from smaller conferences(i.e. The Sunbelt and American). In the College Football Playoffs, you won’t have a chance of getting in the playoffs unless your team is in one of the Power 5 conferences (ACC, SEC, Pac 12, Big 10 and Big East). Obviously, this doesn’t seem fair. College football could learn a lot from the college basketball system.
Now we get to 2014. In 2014, the BCS executives finally had some sense to say that their system was bad. They changed it to a normal playoff system. However, the bracket for the playoff system only contained four teams. This is not normal. The NCAA basketball playoff tournament starts with 64 teams. The NBA playoffs start with 16 teams. The NFL playoffs start with 12 teams. This proves that a playoff bracket containing 4 teams is quite abnormal. Now, instead of the two best regular season teams getting the chance, it is the four best. This still does not give teams a chance to prove themselves, because the tenth best team, for example, could easily be as good as the second but may have had a harder schedule. Not to mention the fact that the four teams that make it to the playoffs aren’t even the four top ranked teams. They are chosen from a committee who arbitrarily choose which teams make it to the playoffs. Once again, this is the only main sports league that chooses playoff teams by using a committee.
I don’t know what the answer is. I don’t know whether the playoff system should contain 8 teams or 16 teams or however many teams. All I know is that the current playoff system is flawed and if it doesn’t change then many teams will be deprived of opportunities to make the playoffs and will unfortunately lead to the continuance of the Alabama reign of terror.
