After years and years and years of complaining about the lack of a college football playoff at the highest competitive level, it's finally here! (College Football Playoff 101 courtesy of ESPN) Therefore, all is right now in the world of big-time college football, right?!
Well, the argument over the last 15 years or so has been that "choosing" the top two teams to play for the National Championship would often leave a 3rd team sitting on the sidelines. And yes, I said choosing...if you don't follow college football, you really wouldn't believe how this was (is?) done. Then again, you really, really wouldn't believe how it was done before that! So there was always some sort of controversy after the so-called championship game, particularly when one team was crushed and the #3 team wins handily as well. The fans were always left basically one game short of knowing who was truly the best team each year.
Unfortunately, controversy sells, even if you have to manufacture it. So for the last few weeks, the new "argument" is about how to pick the #4 team and who will be left out now!! Seriously???!!!! So why not add a wild card game for the #4 and #5 team? But then you have to worry about leaving out the #6...the #7...#8...etc, etc, until you end up with the 64 teams (or is it 65 teams?) like the NCAA basketball playoffs?
I get it...sports news is just like any other news...bad news or controversial talk gets people watching. But come on, there has to be limit...even to stupidity, you would think. First of all, it isn't all that hard to pick out the top 3 or 4 teams. And I don't remember a time when there was any mention that the #5 team should somehow have been included in the championship game. So this Tuesday (10/28/2014) the first rankings from this new super committee will come out, which will decide who plays who.
Naturally, all hell is breaking lose on the sports talk shows because there is still much uncertainty at the top. But as my old boss, the Dean, used to say...it's just trying to create some artificial urgency! Anyone seriously looking at ranking the teams would know instantly that, not only do we have weeks of games still to play, but almost every team bunched up at the top is going to play at least a game or two against the others. Time will clear up any doubts about at least half these teams and what will be left would never be confused with the #1 team in the country. And the bottom line is that the only reason a team should be considered for the playoffs is if you could rationally argue for that team to be #1. If not...well, then they don't need to be in it anyway , so who cares!!
For now then, we...the fans...just need to tolerate the noise coming from the talking sports heads and realize that soon enough the answer will be obvious...even to them. Unfortunately, that only means we'll have to endure the next manufactured debate. Oh well....maybe what we really should have is a debate about that!
