"Playoffs? Playoffs?" --Jim Mora

…the regular season cut. Worst idea ever. I have all sorts of ideas about what should be done, but that one would rank dead last. The last thing we need is LESS football.

I, for one, would be all for a playoff, but the logistics just don’t add up for an 8+ team playoff. For one, you’d be taking away bowl bids from conferences who only have one or two bowl affiliations anyway. For instance, the Sun Belt only has ONE bowl affiliation. And as it was made obvious last year by an 8-4 Troy team not getting an at large bowl bid, if you don’t win the Sun Belt, you don’t go bowling. All that to say that you’d be taking those bowl games away from deserving teams. Now, I wish we could go back to the days of the four major bowls with a couple more sprinkled in here and there, but once you’ve created 32+ bowls games with automatic affiliations and money, you can’t go back on that. That’s why I think a tournament system would never work.

A: Yes, less football is bad. Not even really necessary since most of December is taken off anyway.

A: No, only D-1 NCAAF has the issue of “mythical” … every other college sport already settles it on the field. Of course there’s debates, but what’s wrong with that?

The revenue argument and out-of-town concerns just doesn’t fly. The schools are already racking up millions (yes, even “small” schools) and a proper system could be designed to make it even more lucrative. If “Johnny-Come-Lately-St” wants to be taken seriously, they will find a way and the fanbase will enthusiastically support it. The big boys are just that and nobody should shed a tear for them.

The best two I’ve heard/thought of other than 8:

1- 16 teams: 11 conference champs + 5 at-large (everyone else can have their same bowls)

2- same system but use plus-1 for a best of 3

that going back to 11 regular season games would be a bad idea. We had 11 for years and everybody seemed ok. Plus taking out 1 game would actually save the entire country a large amount of gasoline. And let’s face it, most teams make their 12th game pretty much a non game- like UF playing Citadel this week—give me a break. If there were a playoff then SEC teams would try to get their 3 non conference games against good teams to raise their strength of schedule.

But if you talk about money for schools. A real play-off in D-1 would make money for every school. More money then the schools would lose by dropping one game. And there is no reason to wipe out any of the 732 bowls that already exists. An 8 team playoff would at most mean that 8 teams did not go to bowls, but the other 203 bowl eligible teams could still go bowling.

 the best we can hope far anytime in the near future will be a + 1. Keeps the regular season important and it is just one more game for two teams.

since you can go undefeated and not win the championship. But I think an 8 team playoff is too much because most rivalry games are the final game, and I’d hate to see teams playing scrubs vs rivals because they already secured a spot.

the maximum number of games played by a team would be three. There’s far more than three weeks between the end of the regular season and the MNC game.