Failure to do so results in the revocation of your bloggers of america union card and a poke in the arm with a sharpened stick. To avoid such a horrible fate I’m going to provide my take now and also file all the necessary paper as proof of doing so.
Before we continue I must state something that will come as a shock to just about everyone, sports fans and non sports fans alike. The National Championship is stupid.
There.
I said it.
Light your torches, find your pitchforks and “come at me bro”.
Don’t get me wrong. Shiny crystal trophies are nice, but we’re talking about something that is completely out of your team's control. Something that is debated so much and has been for so long, that when discussed in written form an acronym is used to describe it. “MNC” which stands for Mythical National Champion/Championship. Sounds like fun doesn’t it?*
That’s why i don’t get my undies in a bunch like my fellow Nebraska fans when the topic of Penn State in 94ish (if my memory is correct) or Michigan in 97 should get part of that that year’s “MNC”. I don’t care. We won all our games those years and that to me is awesome enough. So, if Michigan or Penn State want to put that year in big letters on their stadium somewhere under “National Champions”, good for them. I’ll still sleep tonight. They did everything they were supposed to, too. They won all of their games.
And don’t even get me started on teams that lose one or two games and still claim the MNC, lame. I’d argue those years shouldn’t even have a MNC. Especially when a two loss team claims it....ick.
Ever since I was old enough to listen to the talking heads on Saturday mornings debate which team really was the best in the nation, I began to grow more and more sick of the topic. To me, especially at that time, it was a bigger deal to beat Oklahoma, win the Big Eight conference, and go to the Orange Bowl. I liked this for several reasons.
- First, it didn’t matter if you were undefeated or not, didn’t matter if you stubbed your toe week two against someone and tarnished your undefeated season, you could always win the conference and go to the Orange Bowl.
- The conference rankings were never based on what some sportswriter in some town far away who never saw a Nebraska game thought of how good Nebraska was. It was all about wins and losses, head to head match-ups, and in rare cases tie-breakers.
- Same deal with the Coaches rankings....
- I always felt like it was our own little mini-world of college football. The Orange Bowl was our bowl, our championship...and even though we lost to a Florida team every year, it was still somehow special.
Another dirty little secret? Playoffs rarely determine who the best team is, especially in a single elimination tournament. Are you gonna try and tell me that the 9-7 New York Giants were really the best team in the NFL last year because they won the Super Bowl** ? The same Giants that at one point lost five out of six of their games including four games in a row? The same team that lost to the Washington Redskins twice? Nuh-uh sorry.
Or what about UConn who won the National Championship in basketball a few years back after finishing NINTH in their conference.....in short, playoffs don’t determine who the best team is, only who is on a roll at the end of the season.
To put it in yet another way, Bertrand Russell’s quote about war comes to mind; “War does not determine who is right - only who is left."
So I think of playoffs like this “Playoffs don’t determine who is best, only who is left”
All of this comes about as I write this, because the NCAA is considering a four team playoff at the end of the regular season. At first I was excited about this. I know, I know, I just got done griping about how playoffs don’t determine a champion, and I stand by that, they don’t. However, playoffs have one really important factor in their corner.....playoffs = more football, and I can’t ever have enough football.
Then I heard the local radio guys debating how those four teams would be determined and realized that a four team playoff wouldn’t put an end to the constant debate about “Who is #1” it only pushes the problem a tiny bit farther down the chain.
So, why did the old rich white guys in charge of college football's highest level finally change their tune?
- Well last year’s MNC featured a rematch of two teams from the same division of the same conference.
- A conference that has now had a team win the “National Championship” five years in a row. So no matter who won, it would be from the same conference....again.
- The game itself a rematch of a field goal miss/make fest that ended in a 9-6 overtime ‘thriller’.**
- It didn’t help that the game was hyped for months beforehand either....so, people were tired of hearing about the FIRST game even before it was played,...let alone the rematch in the MNC
All of this added up to less than stellar ratings for a college football MNC, which meant the fat cats finally got hit somewhere where they actually cared about,...the wallet.
So, now they are meeting in high rise offices, late into the night scrambling to find the perfect formula. Unfortunately, there isn’t one.
I’d argue that although the MNC this year sucked. Both as a match up and a game itself, I still have to admit that those were indeed probably the two best teams in the country. No combination of fancy computer formulas, voters, even playoffs can prevent a championship stinker once in awhile. How many Super Bowls can you remember that weren’t all that competitive? Had teams you didn’t care about? Where the commercials were just ‘meh’?
What to do then? Well, in next week’s blog, I will detail my design for College football’s postseason. Keep in mind I don’t want to, but it’s another blog requirement, and I really don’t want to be poked with a sharp stick.
* No
**That was the game where your girlfriend shushed everyone during the commercials so she could hear what the talking baby said, then blabbed loudly during the actual game. Seriously dude, did you HAVE to bring her?
*** I fell asleep during the first quarter
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