College Football Playoff: Why Ex-SEC Commissioner Still Backs Current System

As we wrote about yesterday, the BCS conference commissioners got together and are trying to lay out a blueprint to change how a national champion is decided in college football. Of course this would have to do with getting rid of the BCS and installing some type of playoff format.

These meetings are expected to last for several months due to many issues that have to be figured out. But it was the former SEC commissioner Roy Kramer that had to most to say about installing a playoff for college football.

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I’m not sure I would change anything. You’re not going to end the controversy if you pick four teams, because now you’re picking between teams that are fourth and fifth, and that’s going to be a lot more controversial than picking the top two teams, because all of those teams are going to look alike. You would have had tremendous controversy last year over who that fourth team was going to be…

There is a danger in this of going too far, and you can see that to a degree through basketball. We’ve left college basketball as a one-month sport, because people are only interested in March. They’re not interested in college basketball in December or January, because people view those games as preliminary games. You have to be careful, because college football is different.

College football is the backbone of college athletic programs, and you’ve got to make the regular season significant and keep it significant. So whatever structure you come up with, you cannot overlook the regular season and the importance of what that is to all of our programs.”

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Kramer makes a great point about the regular season still being irrelevant in college football. We may not like the current BCS system, but at least the regular season means something, and with just one loss, your postseason dreams could be crushed. That's not the case with college basketball, as he pointed out, and it's important that with whatever format they end up agreeing upon does not include an absurd number of teams.

The good news is that majority of the commissioners have agreed that the format should include four teams. The Pac-12 would like a four-team playoff that includes conference champions, the Big 12 would like something similar and the Big Ten would like four teams as well, just with the higher seeds being awarded home playoff games, rather than a neutral site. So with that out of the way, it's something we shouldn't really be concerned about.

But let's say that everybody does agree upon four teams, will people still argue about that fifth team that got left out like Kramer suggested?

Of course they will. Even in the NCAA basketball tournament, we still have people cry about the Nos. 69 and 70 teams that were left out. It's almost a guarantee that there will be debates about the five- and six-ranked teams that won't participate in a playoff. 

Let's look at last year for example. If a four-team playoff was set in stone last season, the playoff format would look like:

If the top four teams were included in a four-team playoff, this is how it would look:

1 LSU (13-0) vs. 4 Stanford (11-1)

2 Alabama (11-1) vs. 3 Oklahoma State (11-1)

Those were the top four teams in the country last season, and it's nearly impossible to argue that any of those teams don't belong. Now if it was an eight-team playoff format like President Obama suggested, the format would look like:

1 LSU (13-0) vs. 8 Kansas State (10-2)

4 Stanford (11-1) vs. 5 Oregon (11-2)

3 Oklahoma State (11-1) vs. 6 Arkansas (10-2)

2 Alabama (11-1) vs. 7 Boise State (11-1)

Now three of the four teams you've added have lost two games, and Boise State plays a schedule that isn't even worth considering. Sure you could argue that they're equally talented, but they didn't get the job done in the regular season to deserve mention. 

There is no system that will ever be perfect, and there will always be arguments and debates on which team was really the better team. But four teams seems perfectly fine, it's the only system that will keep the competitiveness to the regular season without going overboard on the amount of playoff teams.