Here is a defense of an 8-Team Playoff, and an example of what it may look like this year. I prefer a 16-Team version, with automatic bids for all conference winners (partly for reasons I defended in my post below), and with 5 at-large teams (the 5 highest ranked teams that are not conference champs). However, this 8-teams scenario is way better than what we have, and I think it would be pretty good overall. He argues for keeping a 2 teams per conference limit, which I disagree with. Realistically, a conference would only occasionally have a third team in the playoffs under the 11/5 system, and when there is a third team, we are talking about a top 12 type team, most likely...and we are talking about a conference with some very dominant teams at the top. We should remember when thinking about this part of the design that there are sometimes great teams in conferences that do not play each other in the regular season, nor in the championship game--LSU and Georgia did not play each last year, for example. Kansas didn't play hardly any good Big 12 South teams last year (and Missouri hardly plays any this year--just Texas). Since anomalies like this occur within the conferences, I think it's important not to put conference limits on what teams get included in the playoffs. And even if 3 teams from a conference are invited, there are still 3 more available at-large spots for second or even third- place teams from other conferences.
Lastly, I think not putting limits on the number of teams invited from 1 conference can be a sort of concession to good conferences, a sort of compromise, since we would be inviting all conference champs, it would be a good way to set it up so that having a less-than-stellar conference champ would not push out a stellar non-champ from a currently more competitive conference (Remember Gator fans, Florida would have made the playoffs last year in this 11/5 system I defend! A Gator team with obvious flaws would have been in... as well as ALL conference champs.)
2 comments:
he doesn't count the big east as a major conference. they are a bcs conference... and maybe not this year, but in the last few years I think they've been on par with the acc, big 10, and pac 10.
Yeah, a lot of people might think a 6-2 formula, with the Big East champ included would be better--I think it would be, considering the ACC and Big East champs have been about equal recently... but with an 8 team format, I'd almost prefer just selecting 8 teams. My preference for the standard for selection would maybe be 2/3 BCS, 1/3 AP--weights, or something like that. I give 2/3 to BCS because it includes 8-10 polls already within it.
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