So Texas isn't going to the Big XII Championship game? The team that has beat both teams playing in the Big XII Championship game by double digits doesn't get invited? The team that lost one time, on the last play of the game, on the road, to a top ten opponent, at the end of a brutal four game stretch; doesn't get to go to the Big XII Championship? Texas- who won their last four games by 24, 28, and 40 points- hasn't been impressive enough to hold off Oklahoma? Does this make any sense to anyone?
The answer to the last question (the first four were rhetorical) is no; this doesn't make sense to anyone. Even the most diehard Oklahoma fan has to admit Texas is getting screwed, but this is nothing new. Virtually every year at least one team gets screwed (or at least thinks they are getting screwed) out of an opportunity to play for the National Championship because of the lack of a playoff. Every other level of football has some kind of a playoff to decide its champion except Division I FCS. It's stupid, it makes no sense, and despite what President elect Obama or anyone wishes it will probably never change.
The NCAA offers two main reasons for not having a playoff, and even though they make little to no sense we as college football fans are supposed to accept them as fact:
1. It will take too much time and cause "student"-athletes to miss too much class.
This is stupid for some many reasons I don't really know where to start. First, let me point out the proposed college football playoff would take place between later December and early January when most colleges are on their holiday break. Second, its absolutely stupid to think Division I football players would end up missing anymore class time than every other level of football that has a playoff system, or anymore than basketball teams that play mid-week games and participate in preseason, conference, and postseason tournaments. Also, why does the NCAA insist on pretending they are so worried about "student"-athletes? The whole idea of college athletes being students before they are athletes may very well be the biggest farce in all of athletics.
Only supreme dorks consider themselves students first when they're in college. Taking care of academics is a necessary part of the collegiate experience, but no one puts that as they're number one priority. If the random college kid doesn't put academics as priority, why does the NCAA insist on creating the facade that scholarship athletes do. Think about it, when you went home after you first semester of college what did you talk about with your friends? Did you talk about dorm life, the opposite sex, your new friends, and what you've done with your new found freedom or did you discuss student-teacher ratios? Learning in the classroom is an important aspect of the college experience, but falls somewhere between learning to do laundry and learning to make ramen noodles.
If academics is so important to the NCAA why do they let so many teams graduate less than fifty percent of their black athletes? Why didn't they use graduation rates as the Big XII tie breaker, like Mike Leach suggested, rather than a ridiculous BCS formula? If college athletics are all about turning young men into upstanding citizens I would prefer the team that is best at graduating players be rewarded, not the team that scores a touchdown with under thirty seconds left to impress computers while simultaneously humiliating a group of "student"-athletes playing the final home game of their athletic careers. It's nice to have athletes who are good students, but lets not act like people are going to have interest in watching slow out of shape kids throw around a football because they've got 4.0 GPAs.
2. A playoff will ruin the tradition of the New Year's Day Bowls.
Not quite as stupid as the missing class excuse, but the "tradition" excuse is still pretty freakin' dumb. Just because something is tradition doesn't mean it's a good idea. Not allowing black and white athletes to play on the same field used to be tradition, and desegregation hasn't exactly killed athletics. We shouldn't act like college football hasn't already sold out the Bowl tradition either. Bowl used to be played on New Year's Day and represented an opportunity for the top teams in the country to showcase their skills. Now the "Bowl season" last nearly a month, and any team that fields a half way decent team can get an invitation. Any company willing to shell out enough money to rent a stadium and pay for two .500 teams' travel can be the title sponsor of a bowl game. Twenty years ago going to a bowl game was an honor for the teams that made it; now if a coach from a major conference doesn't make it to a bowl for a few years they'll be fired. If people are worried about the college football New Year's Day tradition being ruined they are about ten years too late. It's like someone worrying that Buckethead quitting Guns 'n Roses is going to the ruin the band even though they've been irrelevant since Slash left.
The real reason college football has not gone to a playoff system is simple: money. Bowl games make a lot of people a lot of money, and as long as the money keeps flowing it will never change. People argue just as much if not more money could be made from a playoff system, but it doesn't matter. The money is so good right now it would be stupid to switch things up and risk losing any of it.
With the current system every major bowl is played on national television in front of 80,000+ people who are paying premium money for admissions, parking, merchandise, concessions ect. Most of these 80,000+ people are boosters and alumni who've travelled from cross country. For these people a bowl game represents a family vacation, and a very expensive one at that.
Take this year for example, it's not going to be cheap for John Doe from State College, PA to take time off work and bring his family out to California to watch the Rose Bowl. He is able to do it because with the current bowl system it's a once a year event that last a couple of days. With a playoff system however there'd be multiple games talking place over the period of a month or so. What if Penn St. wins their first round game? Is John Doe supposed to travel from Pennsylvania, to Pasadena for the Rose Bowl, to Miami for the Orange bowl, to New Orleans for the Sugar Bowl? We are expecting John Doe to travel back and forth across the country, live out of hotel rooms, and take a month out of work. Screw worrying about kids missing class, the real issue is the people paying money for tickets missing work.*
It's easy to fill a 20,000 seat basketball arena when you have three or four games being played at that venue. It's a lot more difficult to fill an 80,000 seat neutral site stadium for one game for weeks on end.
The next logical option is to let schools host the playoff games; the problem is the weather. There is a reason the Big 10 wraps up its regular season two weeks before every other conference, the weather sucks in Big 10 country. Playing football outdoors anywhere within 80 miles of the Great Lakes after Thanksgiving is asking for trouble. Not only would the quality of play suffer due to the weather, but getting people to pay top dollar and fill the stadium would be a challenge.
I know what you're thinking, "but Brian, NFL teams do it."
Filling an NFL stadium is a lot easier than filling a college stadium. First you have more people living in the surrounding area. NFL cities usually have a few million people living around them; college towns usually have a couple hundred thousand. College stadiums are also a lot bigger than NFL stadiums, usually by about 20,000 seats. It should also be noted about 1/3 of fans at college games are student, many of who will be out of town for holiday break. A lot of these college towns aren't exactly booming economically; most people that graduate college move away to start a career and start making money. I don't care what school you are talking about you'll be hard pressed to find 90,000 townies that can afford to spend a few hundred or even a few thousand dollars to go to a football game; this means you are banking on fans and alumni flying in to see the game. Your typical northern college town doesn't have a big enough airport to support tens of thousand of fans and media arriving in just a matter of days. That means you are asking people to fly into a major city, rent a car, and drive how ever far they have to drive to get to the town they are headed. As a Notre Dame fan I would rather fly to a warm weather location for a bowl game than fly to Chicago and drive an hour and a half to South Bend in Northern Indiana weather. Call me crazy but I prefer flying in and out of LAX a lot more enjoyable than dealing with 8 hour delays in O'Hare.
Right now College Football is as healthy as any sport in America. There is a good chance a playoff could help it prosper even more, but there is also the chance it could hurt it. It would be like Michael Phelps deciding he is going to start breathing every other stroke while swimming butterfly because conventional wisdom says its faster, why risk it? Ten years from now the NCAA doesn't want to be like Fruit from the Wire when he ask the police "why [they] had to go [expletive] with the program."
*Take it from a guy who has missed class in college and work in the real world over the past three years, missing work it a LOT worse. If you miss a class in college you can send an email and all is forgotten. If you miss a few days of work because you messed up filling out the vacation paperwork when you took a trip to Vegas they'll kick you off producing the Sports Reporters and make you work weekend overnights for 6 months and counting... missing work sucks.