My question is why is college football different in the first place? They have some type of playoff system at every other level of football except College Football. This is ridiculous. They need to have a playoff system.
I wonder if theres a way to have bowl games and a playoff system. Maybe the teams who dont make the tourney go to bowl games???
it is a thing called history that people over the age of 30 or so might have a bit of a clue about if they have any clue at all
you see there was a time when it cost a great deal of money to move 80+ people all around the country to play a sport on a single day of each week for 10 or 11 weeks of the season......hell believe it or not there was a time when college football was played that commercial airline travel was non-existent and even when it did exist it was expensive, not that frequent, and only served a few destinations.......many college bowl games existed long before airline travel became a common thing with $79 dollar bags fly free to just about any place with 250K people much less charter flights and the like
and you see the bowls and such existed for so long before that period when it was easy for players, much less fans, to travel all over the place for a game that those games became something called history and tradition.....you know the thing that everyone bitches about with conference realignment
and even when air travel was more frequent college athletics budgets were much smaller so teams still played in conferences that had a small geographic footprint so that travel was cheap and fans could make the games
and believe it or not there was a time when there were only three TV channels in the entire country and they were all broadcast over the air instead of 400 channels on fiber with ESPN - ESPN The Ocho.....see some people even over the age of 30 might still not know about this time period because while other teams and universities were busy investing in their program, facilities, and building the sport into what it is today those other teams and their fans were busy riding the pine, or playing in DII, or they did not even have a team much less investing in it and helping build bowl games into the tradition, history, and financial giants that they are today
so of course when you don't know about any of that history or tradition, when you have done nothing to build any of it, and when all you have done is show up decades later with a begging bowl it is easy to think "why can't I get in on that" or "why won't they just hand me some of that for all the nothing that I have done in the past to contribute to the success of it"
and when you don't understand there was a time when pro sports was a pretty terrible job that did not pay all that much, there were fewer teams, and most college athletes were actually there for the degrees (and most pro athletes had other jobs as well) it is easy to look at college sports today and ignore how things came about and wonder why something can't just magically morph into what the pros are today
if it was not for the teams accused of being greedy and selfish building things up then all the begging bowl teams would still be what they were back then....nothing....because there would be nothing to gain by holding out the begging bowl or trying to get in on something that there was little long term effort made by them to build
nobody is going to suddenly start caring about, paying to watch, and show up to see a team in the playoffs or national championships when that team can't even get a small % of their own students and local alumni to do that
pro football has 32 teams in the largest markets in the USA......college sports had several hundred programs at all levels and 120+ at the highest level......just one level down (where many of that 120+ played just a short time back in history) has a difficult time filling stadiums for their championships that are much smaller than the on campus stadiums of many of the "greedy" D1-A teams much less some of the major bowl venues so thinking that begging bowl teams will suddenly bring the fans, support, and dollars because they were this years cinderella story is just a joke
and even if there is big money in college sports it is still amateur sports which means it is more difficult to push an injured player to play because it is an important game (see the lawsuits facing the pros now) and it means that you can't just play players game after game for extremely long seasons as long or longer than the prop seasons.....and with hundreds of college programs feeding into 32 pro teams every year it means there is much more athletic parity in the pros and that means with the exception of a few key positions it is difficult for a single player or even two players to make a massive difference if they are or are not on the field.....not so much on college ball
so while it might be exciting to see sucksnuts state play LSU or Alabama in the first round of some crappy playoff format all it will take to turn that game and the next game into crap, id for a single player to go down in a game because some player from sucknuts took a cheap shot or because of just an injury.....that is what makes baseball, basketball, and other college sports different.....players can get injured in any sport, but in football it is much more common and the injuries usually take much longer to heal and even small injuries require time to heal because you are going back into 100% physical contact every single play
and with the pros having bounty gate it would only be a matter of time until something similar happened at the college level (not that it can't now) but it will be much more likely to happen when each and every season you have some team from the sorryass conference going against the big boys in a game they should and probably will get blown out in...and if that injury or that on purpose cheap shot happens to a particular player then it ruins that game and probably ruins the next game as well when an over matched team or a team with a top player advances to the next game and then gets blown out while everyone knows the outcome could have been different and should have been different
pros are pros......they are paid to play...they are paid to play a bit hurt, they get money for playoff wins, and they have more parity.....in the college game an injury can happen like Colt McCoy in 2009, but that is part of the breaks and how it goes, but if you start having crap like that in first round playoff games with top teams going against garbage people will quickly tune out and even more so if the injury was because of a questionable hit (the Colt McCoy injury was not questionable at all it was a freak stinger) but still having garbage games for 2-3 weeks so a team that most everyone knows is a top team can let sucknuts state have "their big chance" that they "earned" by winning the crapfest conference just sucks and it sucks worse for amateur athletes because those top teams don't owe some sorry team another "shot" at anything when that top team has gone out and taken care of business week in and week out
there is never going to be a way to have "parity" with 120+ teams, there will never be a way to have "parity" with 120 teams in 10 or so conferences, and the idea of crapping things up with forced regional conferences with "parity" in them is just worse because it is a great way to kill the regular season (like a stupid all Texas conference filled with 12 teams from the #1 budget in college sports to some of the lowest budgets in college sports) because that is just a way for 4-6 teams to suck in the regular season and suck forever while killing the chance for top teams to earn money and do what they want to do and play who they want to play and for people to see games they want to see
if you are not happy with the setup they take your ball, your fans, your TV viewers, and all that comes with it and break away and start the parity division and you can be just like D1-AA with no revenues from much of anything, but at least you will have "parity" of nothingness and an equal shot at something that most people in the world will ignore....that or earn your "big chance" in the regular season by scheduling and beating top teams and then taking care of business in the crapfest conference and try having a few fans to show up to watch the games as well while you are at it
