Mission Creep In March
Monday, March 17, 2008 at 08:06AM Wherever there's a trough, there's always more hungry mouths to be fed than available food. In sports the solution seems to be: get a bigger trough.
The NCAA basketball tournament's about to begin, yet already some of the discussion isn't about basketball games but expanding the damn thing even further beyond its 64/65 team arrangement.
Some people want to be cute by a half, and expand the thing to 68 games.
Others? Massive growth. Sportz Assasin wants a 96-team field. Bobby Knight's thinking 128 teams (!!!). Enough is never enough. If conference tournaments weren't already enough of a sham (hello, USD and Georgia, great stories both but c'mon), these kinds of proposals all strike at college basketball's already wimpy regular season.
What's interesting is that despite all this expansion talk, much of the talk of bubble teams has been about how weak a crop of back-end teams there are this year. Isn't it sort of foolish to welcome in even more substandard teams?
If someone is seriously interested in carving out even more time for a postseason tournament, shouldn't "series" games be a consideration? How about having teams in the "Final Four" play each other in a best of three, same goes with the championship?
The fact that I don't really hear that kind of talk leads me to believe that there's just no seriousness about this tournament. People -- not just the fans, but those who have a responsibility to the game of college basketball -- aren't interested in a championship. They want the chaos of the tournament. It's Roman theatre over the idea of having a representative, meaningful championship.
That is the fate of college football if we even move towards any kind of postseason tournament. If things go that way, at first everyone's going to go ok let's keep this thing limited, do this "plus one" thing. Over time, too many other forces will demand a seat at the table and then it will be eight teams. Then 16. This is mission creep and is horrifyingly inevitable.
In the end, nobody will get what they really want and the college football game will be left with a monstrosity that is ultimately meaningless and created at the expense of several (meaningful) regular season games.
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If you didn't already figure out by now, I'm against a playoff in college football. This doesn't mean I'm against playoffs in general -- just bad playoffs. Playoffs should actually count for something. They should be a test for all involved but also spit out the best team at the end of the process. This means having teams compete in several head-to-head series, not one-and-done games that leave way too much to luck, chance, and other outside variables. Major League Baseball has the right idea, but even then it produces some questionable championship teams. The NBA seems to get it right most often, but then they've got best of 5 and 7 game series. That simply cannot happen with football when to be safe you're playing about one game a week.
Given the nature of 1)football and 2)college sports, it's simply impossible to have anything resembling a meaningful playoff for college football. I urge people to abandon the notion. The game has gotten smart by calling its "championship" mythical. It is exactly that --- mythical, and I'm ok with that. I'm more interested in the several hundred dramatic regular season games than a handful of postseason crap shoots anyway. Give me LSU/Florida in September over LSU/Ohio State in January any day of the week and twice on Sunday. We're the only game around with a compelling regular season and I'd like to keep it that way.
For more of my thoughts on this issue, see my "Playoffs = Bad Idea" category here, and read my entry Le Playoffs. If you're of like mind, send an email my way with your name or the name of your blog/website to be added to The Coalition (you're not alone!) of people against a playoff in college football on the menu at left.
Reader Comments (3)
Your argument ignores this problem. No Comptroller, CFO, CMO, CIO, etc can be promoted to CEO because you incorrectly believe tournaments are wrong. Why do you despise tournament style competition?
Except for NCAA Division I-A, all sporting league in the world, professional and amateur, exist to determine a singular champion. In your argument, no single champion exist; just a bunch of conference champions.
If the NCAA Division I-A model is so superior, how come no other sports league in the world offers the same outcome?
Your argument ignores the history of NCAA Division I-A as well as NCAA Division I basketball. You know nothing about your topic material. Thus, your argument suffers its fatal flaw.
To compete! As done 12 times in the college football regular season. Or is a regular season not competition, which you wrongly seem to imply here.
"If competition does not exist to determine a champion, then why does competition exist?"
Because the singular act of competition is a human and animal need. It exists not to determine champions (although it can lead to such determinations) but because we're wired to enjoy it.
"Your argument ignores this problem. No Comptroller, CFO, CMO, CIO, etc can be promoted to CEO because you incorrectly believe tournaments are wrong"
To the contrary. I believe poorly designed tournaments, poorly designed competitions are wrong. You have completely ignored me stating as much. Please go back and re-read my entry. Not all tournaments are wrong, just the badly drawn ones.
"Why do you despise tournament style competition?"
I don't. I despite one-and-done games that leave entirely too much up to chance and outside factors instead of letting the quality of teams determine their fates. Playing multiple games between teams in a series helps smooth all that error out and ignoring this fact is in fact an incredibly dumb way of drawing up a tournament.
The NFL and college basketball suffer from this disease and frankly the nature of football (best only played once a week) and college sports in general (in theory these competitors are students as well as athletes) make it impossible to assemble a fair, representative tournament.
The bonus side effect of a tournament, as seen in all the other sports, is a diminished regular season. It's completely dead in college basketball, hanging by a thread in the NBA, over-extended in baseball and only the NFL has anything even remotely in college football's league, and that's mostly a byproduct of the league's salary cap rules than the actual product on the field.
Right now, college football's major drawing card is its regular season, and it's been that way for over a century.
"If the NCAA Division I-A model is so superior, how come no other sports league in the world offers the same outcome?"
I've never said the entire model is superior. However, its emphasis on the regular season is superior to all other leagues' regular seasons. I think this makes the college football game unique, and that unique nature of the game is worth preserving. Any additional changes to its postseason structure greatly threaten what remains the last meaningful, interesting regular season in all of American sport.
"Your argument ignores the history of NCAA Division I-A as well as NCAA Division I basketball"
Your argument ignores much of what I've actually written and reasonably argued. I'm afraid you only loosely understand what I'm actually writing on here, and are arguing against some constructions of arguments you think I'm making but I'm really not.
Quite the contrary. I think the story of D-1 basketball over the past 40 or so years is a perfect example of what happens with a playoff over time.
There's never been a playoff format established for a major American sport that hasn't been extended as time has gone on.