Posted on Mon, Dec. 01, 2008

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So, you think an 8-team playoff is the answer?

In case you weren’t sure how important college football is throughout most of the country just consider that the president-elect has chimed in with a call for a playoff system. As if critics of the Bowl Championship Series needed any more campaign fodder.

Barack Obama is in favor of an eight-team playoff, with schools scaling back to an 11-game regular season. We can only hope his economic plan is more feasible.

On a day when two of the best teams in the country can’t even get into the Big 12 Championship Game, the BCS problems loom larger than ever. The fact is that an eight-team playoff — apparently the popular choice among president-elects, the media and college coaches — excludes too many deserving teams.

And eliminating a 12th game and the revenue it derives for the athletic department coffers is like beefing up security after a prison break. The NCAA would have to negotiate a pretty lucrative TV playoff package to make that work.

At paramount issue is how do you determine the eight playoff teams? Do you automatically include the six BCS conference champions and two at-large teams? In that case, it’s possible — given conference championship results and other factors — that Texas, Texas Tech, Oklahoma, Alabama, Southern Cal, and three non-BCS unbeatens Utah, Ball State and Boise State, would be vying for two spots. Good luck with that.

Or, do you simply determine the eight playoff berths by the BCS rankings, that fool-proof system using computers and Top 25 polls voted by coaches and media, most of whom base their research on watching ESPN’s SportsCenter.

Case in point: We randomly heard a play-by-play broadcaster on a satellite sports show last week authoritatively claim that Texas Tech would score 65 points in a rout of Oklahoma; that Michigan State would handle Penn State; and that there wasn’t much respect for Boise State because football’s "Blue Man Group" wins with trick plays.

The Monday Morning Quarterback doesn’t know whether this "expert" votes in any poll, but if he is representative of the so-called expertise that coaches and sportswriters are bringing to the table, then we’re voting for more computers.

We’ve also heard about the "plus one" concept, whereby the winner of the current BCS championship game would play the highest-ranked winner of the other BCS bowls in a "We really mean it, this is the final game" championship.

But let’s say that Alabama beats Florida in the Southeastern Conference title game next weekend, and then wins the BCS championship to finish 14-0 — should the Tide have to play again to validate itself?

Or, can you logistically schedule a "plus one" game only if you need it? And who determines whether you need it?

These are rhetorical questions, by the way.

Look, folks, the system isn’t going to change by presidential decree or the fact that things don’t always sort themselves out at the end. Have you every tried to decipher all the tiebreaks in the NFL playoff format? We think it may come down to which team has fewer convicted felons.

We don’t, however, buy into the theory that a BCS playoff would devalue the regular season or make rivalries less important — another argument we heard discussed on the radio last week.

College rivalries are too important for a school like Alabama, for example, to have rested its starters against Auburn to prepare for Florida. And losing a rivalry game might affect a team’s seeding in a playoff format.

No, bowl games and the money-grubbing 12th games and conference championship games are all impediments to a playoff format that probably needs to include 16 teams.

An eight-team playoff might silence the critics temporarily, but how long do you think it would take before we heard complaints about the selection process and calls for an expanded field?

Don’t bother, it’s another rhetorical question.