Originally Posted by
Mott the Hoople
And none of this should mean exactly squat.
Here's the deal with the current CFP. What the country wants is a true national championship. Not a regional one, not one that gives away money to NFL towns with Bowl games that could give a shit less about college football and not a championship by proxy decided by talking heads on TV who have a vested financial interest in who plays in the CFP and are utterly incapable of being objective.
So the CFP was a big step in the right direction but a big mistake was make by not making winning a Conference Championship game a requirement, at the insistence of the SEC.
This can be fixed without extending the season into additional games by a couple of reforms but those reforms have to be done on a "you can't have your cake and eat it too" basis which the SEC will not like. That being either winning a Conference Championship game matters or they don't. Right now they don't, which means division championships don't really matter either, which means the CFP is a joke. What matters currently is a beauty contest of subjectivity. To get rid of that we can do two things.
#1. Make Conference championship games mean something. Make winning a conference championship game a requirement for being selected for the CFP. That would solve the current problem. SEC wouldn't like it but it's a fix.
If that's not acceptable than;
#2. Then lets stop pretending conference championships mean something and get rid of them. Based on regular season records alone we know who the conference champions are right now. So instead of this week being conference championship game week we make this the first round of an 8 team play off. The Conference Champion of the Power 5 conferences get automatic bids. That's not an issue. Right now we know that Clemson has the best record in the ACC, OK in the Big 12, Alabama in the SEC, Washington in the Pac 12. OSU and NW have identical conference records, 8-1 but OSU wins about every tie breaker you can think of so OSU would be the Big Ten Champ. That leaves three at large teams selected by record and other objective and subjective criteria. Which means the SEC can still have it's precious second team. It also means a better opportunity for a non-power 5 team to qualify for the CFP. The CFP committee would then rank the teams 1-8 with top four teams hosting the first round. Using the current ranking the match ups would be UA vs UW, Clemson vs. UCF(or Mich), ND vs OSU, GA vs OK. Now I don't know about you guys but I'd rather see any of these match ups than any of the Conference Championship Game as at least of half of the match ups in the Conference Championship games aren't relevant to the National Championship. These match ups would all be relevant.
So my preference would be # 2 though it's not perfect and #1 option would certainly be better than what we currently have. If we select # 2 that also helps with scheduling because the power conference could then just simply get rid of divisions. So this makes option #2 the better choice in my eyes.
As it is now, if the CFP remains as it is, I'd like to see the Big 10 and Pac 12, who keep getting screwed, pull out of CFP, pull the Rose Bowl out of the CFP and continue on with the Rose Bowl tradition of Pac 12 vs BIG and return it back to being the most significant game played annually in College Football.
Bookmarks