College Football Bowl Season 2018-19

Can they expand the playoff without whacking conference championship games? No way the SEC is giving up its cultural bonanza of the title game. Especially because that would require cost CBS a very lucrative game.

If the NCAA is serious about player safety, it will have to whack a regular-season game off the schedule.

 

Speed. UAB put up three long TD passes to Xavier Ubosi on a simple fly pattern. They simply had no one who could cover him. We started a running QB the first eight games and Ubosi really didn't get fully utilized, so his numbers weren't that great for the NFL to look at .

I think he aced his job interview last night.

 

Good on ya.

This was the only game I didn’t play against the MAC team as Ohio was just a good matchup vs SDSU. Aztecs came in losing three in a row.

 

I could see them either shrugging off the player safety concern all together or simply say the kids have a month off before the start of the playoffs so they'll be fine. The NCAA would do well, however, to lop off a regular season game and mandating everyone go to a 9-game conference season. You'd only lose the creampuff games and you keep the conference championships.

 

Not a chance in flaming hell. A lot of marginal programs need that extra gate.

All the lower level NCAA divisions (FCS, D2, D3) play 14-15 games including playoffs, without any reports of catastrophic epidemics of injuries.

Not to mention most high school divisions.

In addition, under almost any playoff plan, you're going to have 2-or-3 week breaks between a couple playoff rounds.

Play a 12-game season, league title game if you want, then 3 more in an 8-team playoff.

Total of 16 games, everybody's happy. Until the #9-12 teams start bitching.

 

And it won't be one of the "paycheck" games. Probably shouldn't be for that matter since those keep FCS programs afloat.

 

Expanding the playoffs only extends the season for TWO TEAMS.*

So in order to minimize the effects of one additional game on two teams, we're going to cut the season one game for 130 teams?

If one additional game of football is such a catastrophic safety risk, we probably better rethink whether we should play football at all.






* I know 4 additional teams would play an additional game, but only two would have the season extended to 15 games total.

 

Reminds me of the argument Bill Hancock, who is truly one of the nicest people I've ever met, made against the playoff when he was the BCS guy: "Bracket Creep."
Wherever you create a cutoff, there will be angst.

Something else occurred to me. It's going to be harder to get qualified people -- especially retired coaches -- to do this committee thing if you double the size of the field. As things stand now, the selection process is relatively simple. About 95% of the trouble is in the needless weekly commutes to DFW to write the script for an ESPN reality show. If you require that silly venture for meaningless preliminary rankings and then create extra work associated with multiple seeding possibilities, you'll scare away candidates.

 

Well, Michigan started its HS playoffs in 1975 with 4 teams in 4 classes = 16 teams total. (At the time there were about 720 high schools playing football.)

The first several years, numerous undefeated teams did not make the playoffs.

After a few years, they expanded to 8, then 16, then 32, teams per class. Every time they expanded, some teams missed out on the playoffs by one game. The bitching continued.

In the 1990s, they doubled the field to eight divisions. So now instead of 16 teams in the playoffs as in 1975, there were 256 teams.

Due to mathematical distribution, when they got to 256 teams, it became virtually impossible for any team with a record worse than 7-2 to miss the playoffs.

Yet still, some teams insisted on remaining in leagues with schools less than half their enrollment and playing teams with aggregate records of 6-75, so mathematically remote as it seemed, some teams managed to go 6-3 and miss the playoffs. More screeching ensued, so finally it was decided to forget about SOS, playoff points and power ratings -- win 6 games and you are in, period. In practice, most of the 5-4 teams get in too -- some teams have gotten in at 4-5.

(About that time, 8-man football got going, so now they have two playoff divisions in 8-man, too. So 10 championship divisions -- with about 100 fewer total schools than they had in 1975, due to consolidations.)

Now of course, the teams with records of 4-5 and 3-6 want to add another round, so they can be guaranteed playoff berths as well.

Once they add another round after that, everybody will be in, even down to 0-9. Then, the bitching will focus on who gets byes and home field advantage.

 

I was being diplomatic but I fully agree. Two teams would be in line for up to 16 games including a conference title game. With a month between games, the players will be fine.

But I do want to see all conferences go to a 9-game conference schedule. This we're the greatest conference because we build in room to play 4 creampuffs is nonsense.

 

His name is actually Bryant Vincent.