College Football Playoffs—Has the Time Come?

Ah, spring. The time of year when the leaves come out, the grass turns green, and now the talk of a college football playoff begins.

Yes, it’s that time again. Time to talk college football playoffs. Florida State President T.K Wetherell piped up about it last week at a football issues forum. Wetherell is convinced that at a minimum a “Plus One” playoff is going to eventually happen.

Why? Money. Wasn’t money the reason not to have a playoff, you ask? It appears Wetherell is pointing at the gas pump as a reason that schools will lose money when playing throw away games.

“How am I going to get people to drive from Miami to Tallahassee, Florida, with gas at $4 a gallon, to watch us play UT-Chattanooga?” Wetherell said Friday.

So, what we could be looking at is teams losing money traveling to a stadium that is not filling its seats. So how can the schools fix this? Teams that make the “Plus One” mini tournament essentially are getting two Bowl Games, right?

You talk to ABC and ESPN, you’re talking something in the neighborhood of the Final Four type thing [for a playoff],” Wetherell said. “That’s a huge amount of money. We’ll [the presidents] run out of money, then we’ll figure out a way to do it. The fight won’t be over whether to do it or not, the fight will be over the take, the split.”

What about those kids and their studies? You surely cannot expect that football players can maintain their grades and do this, right?

“In my judgment, if you take every argument that’s been made today and apply it to any other sport on a college campus, then you’d have to cancel the (College) World Series, the Final Four, the soccer tournament,” he said. “If you want to do it, it can be done."

“Everybody’s going to be sitting here—I don’t know, probably not in my lifetime at Florida State—saying, `You know, we really could move this back. And, by the way, we do play 63 baseball games and we play baseball through two final-exam periods, not one. Somehow, they all seem to graduate and do pretty good. Oh, those basketball players, we have a real problems with academics in basketball, but we seem to play right on through the tournament.”‘

It’s very interesting to hear Wetherell discuss the finances of the situation. We are not supposed to know that is an issue. It’s all about tradition, right?

It seems so simple to have two teams play one more week. Wait! BCS, BCS! You could still use the BCS and the other Bowl Games could still be played. You just take some of that arguing out of whether or not the number three team should have been in there.

But it’s not fair that the top two teams should have to play another game? There is usually an argument that it isn’t fair that at least one of those two teams shouldn’t be in the top two. If they truly deserve to be there, winning one more game should not be an issue, right?

Ah, everyone has their own take on it. I found this a little extreme of an opinion on it but a pretty comical comparison. This is from dirtysheets at the CBS Sports Community:

"Without a playoff, I really wouldn’t consider college football a 'sport.' It’s more in the area of competitive cheerleading and figure skating, where sure, the participants have to perform well, but in the end, too many other factors can determine the overall winners. Voters and money are more important to college football than the game itself."

Writing this, it occurred to me that there used to be an option in the EA Sports NCAA game to end the year with a championship game or a tournament. Makes me wonder who had the influence on that disappearing. Seems to me it would still be a nice feature to give the user the choice.

Drag and Drop what you would like to see happen in College Football.