BlogPoll Ballot Week 7: Irish Rising

It made the seeding. If an undefeated Alabama team loses to a 4-loss Georgia team in the Championship game, sure Georgia gets in, but they are not going to be seeded #1 like Alabama would have if they had won that game.

Therefore their road to the NC is much more difficult because Georgia has a chance to make it in as a lower seed and play more difficult teams than Alabama would have if they had taken care of Georgia in the Championship game.

Boiled down one of two things can happen: Alabama wins and eliminates any postseason aspirations for the Bulldogs and the Crimson Tide keep their high seed. Georgia wins, gets in, and pulls Alabama’s seeding down, which makes their road much more difficult. That is more intriguing to me than what’s already out there. How can you not vote for something like that? To me, it strengthens the various Conference Championship games, not make them meaningless.

Or, they sneak in and win the whole thing, in which case the SEC Championship game didn’t matter.

Like jkra said, the SEC title game would still matter. IF Alabama was able to “sneak” in a playoff after losing their conference title game (let us not forget a team did the same thing not too long ago and still made the national title game), they would be looking at an uphill battle to win the whole enchilada because of their slip up.

Also, you’re ignoring half of the equation: does a 4-loss Georgia team deserve to be in the "playoffs"? They won the SEC, after all….

I don’t really care who is “deserving” and who isn’t. If Georgia wins the SEC, then they are in. If a playoff had rules by which the conference winners got in—-I’m fine with that. If a clearly great Bama team stumbles in the title game, well they should have won, right? Isn’t that your argument too?

I also don’t act like a loss in the SEC title game would have kept out a deserving team either. If Auburn lost, they feel the repercussions. I’m not sure where you came up with this idea that I thought Auburn deserved something. The SEC title game matters—-either with or without a playoff.

The thing is, with the way things are constructed now we’re still in love with those matchups of undefeated teams meeting in the conference title game like we had with Alabama and Florida a couple years ago. Clearly games like that really matter. In a perfect world, we could have one or two of those games every year.

But we don’t.

Too often we view this through the lens of undefeated teams, when we know in many years the system is not that perfect. I’ve said in the past that the regular season would take a little bit of a hit if there was a playoff in terms of say, the LSU vs. Alabama game coming up in a couple weeks. With how it is now, the loser is knocked out of the national title picture——even though we know there’s a decent chance the winner falters later in the season and the loser can get back in the natty title picture anyway.

We still have this romantic notion of OMG THIS ALABAMA VS. LSU IS SO IMPORTANT, IT WILL DETERMINE THE NATIONAL TITLE GAME IN THE FIRST WEEK OF NOVEMBER!!!

In some seasons it turns out that yes, a game like that was epic, the winner went on to win it all, and the regular season game was super important. But in other years, that game (which was viewed as super important at the time) turns out not to be.

All of this and I haven’t even brought up how much the system sucks anyway. We can have an epic battle in the regular season between LSU & Bama, but still end up with four undefeated teams at the end of the season. What did the holy regular season mean for those two teams left out?

The thing with a playoff is—-it makes more regular season and conference title games matter. It just does.

Some people like to look at a team that goes 12-0 and then loses in the conference title game and misses the playoff and say, “Seeeee, the regular season didn’t matter!!!”

Or even a team going undefeated to the title game, and losing to a 2-loss team that got hot and won it all. There’s a lot of whining that stuff like this devalues the regular season.

Which to a point it does.

However, a playoff would add A LOT to the regular season.

In the vast majority of seasons, the only games that really truly matter are the ones involving an undefeated team. Naturally as we move through the season, less and less games really matter. Again, some people like this romantic notion of an undefeated team going all the way, but the truth is, fewer and fewer fan bases around the country are invested in games outside their favorite team as the season moves on.

What you get by November is 60 games that don’t really matter and maybe two or three that do. Maybe those two or three games matter so much that it makes up for the other 60 -something games every week the rest of the season not meaning much, but then we also run into those pesky seasons like TCU’s last year where those so meaningful games they played without losing really didn’t amount to much.

With a playoff in place, maybe CFB becomes more like the NFL. But that means so many more games matter. More games will matter all season long. They might not be the epic games with undefeated teams, but I think having 20 or more games every week that have implications is pretty exciting.

The example I like to use is ND going to USC to play the last game of the season.

Let’s say ND has 1-loss and USC has 1-loss but cannot get to their conference title game because they lost to another 1-loss team in their division.

If this exact situation unfolds next year with the system we have in place—-what does it matter? Sure we’d be fighting for a likely BCS bowl and the national attention would be decent.

But with a playoff, suddenly this game is beyond huge. ND can go to California, grab an auto-bid into the playoffs and crush the Trojans’ dream of doing the same. I’m sorry but that game would be so huge and the national attention would be much larger than with the current system.

And the thing is, we’d have jockeying like this down to the wire with dozens of teams. Right now we’re focused mainly on teams getting knocked out of the national title game and by late October that focus is down to a handful of teams. So many games just don’t matter, and that would all change if there was a playoff.

It just opens up so many scenarios that would make every season awesome. I don’t really care about getting into philosophical discussions about what is fair and what is right—-a playoff would make college football more exciting and generate so much more money. Conference title games, undefeated teams, and such would still matter, but so would many other games down to the wire involving top 25 teams.

Long post is long.