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NCAA Football Thread - 2024

With no dog in the fight I was just happy we got a good game in the finish. Def would have been better if ND could have stopped at least one of those TDs that bookended halftime, but still an entertaining match, leaving us with simultaneously one of the most and least legitimate champions in CFB history . . .

My overall impression of the first year of the expanded playoff, one day after . . :

1) I'm very disappointed in how it affected the regular season. I mean this in how it obv devalued regular season outcomes, even head-to-head matchups, but also in that it makes watching the games kind of pointless until your team has accumulated a couple of losses and actually has something on the line : /

2) OTOH, once we'd gotten into late October/early November and the games did start to matter, I found watching the playoff race much more entertaining than watching conference title races in previous years. I still think I prefer the full season of meaningful football we used to get, but that last six weeks to a month of the season this year was fantastic . . .

3) The playoffs themselves were a mess, but I think a lot of it can be attributed to growing pains and not endemic to the system. I point particularly to all the conference champions losing their first game and failing to even make the semis, which I think can partially be attributed to seeding and the bracket but I also wonder whether we're going to find out that the bye is a punishment more than a reward. Remember all those games except for UGA started off with the team getting the bye finding themselves in a big hole right away before they were able to shake off the rust and come back . . .

4) I'm not sure what we can do about this one, but it did seem to drag on a little. We've played a full regular season. We don't need another month to determine a champion . . .

5) After a dud of an opening weekend, the playoffs rallied to give us, imo, five quality games out of the twelve played. Looking at the four team playoff that usually only gave us one game worth watching, I'd rather have the five, even if the ratio is about the same. And I think the expanded playoffs will be able to improve this moving forward as they tweak seedings/byes . . .

6) I think the ultimate goal of the playoffs, "inclusion", is fundamentally antithetical to my whole idea of the sport and I'm never going to be able to reconcile it. The whole reason we have a playoff is bc we never used to be able to get 1v2 in the bowl system and we discovered under the BCS that occasionally there was a third team that deserved consideration, but we have never seen a year where more than three teams *earned* an opportunity to play for a national championship and even under those limited systems we occasionally got teams like 2011 Alabama or 2014 Ohio State who were granted unearned access and able to capitalize. Expanding the field only makes it that much more likely that the best team will not be the last one left standing : /

Ofc expanding the playoff also brings us more in line with the lesser sports and therefore will be more appealing to the casual fan, which means it will be a ratings bonanza, but at the expense of the regular season and what was, to me, a more legitimate champion, which is a cost I'll never be comfortable with : (
 
Obviously I'm biased, but I think one of the big benefits of having 8 teams is that it gives an opportunity for teams to grow over the course of the season. In the old format, both Notre Dame (#5 in the CFP rankings) and Ohio State (#6) would have been left out. Notre Dame had one embarrassing loss and improved tremendously over the course of the season. Ohio State had one embarrassing lost (and one non-embarrassing loss to #1 by one point), and finally overcame their demons and figured out how to get a fully cohesive offensive line despite injuries. And there's also Arizona State (CFP #12), who gave us one of the best games of the playoffs. Sure, they would have been in a good bowl game in the old format, but I'm glad that one was part of the playoff.

By comparison to baseball, which IMO now has too large of a playoff, I liked the old 8-out-of-30 teams format. A team that had a rough start in April and May but really jelled over the second half of the year could make a title run, and that's exciting. No one would say that April baseball is meaningless, but the format gave teams with new players time to figure things out and become better, and that's arguably even more important in college football where the players are younger, less experienced, and changing more frequently (the latter always having been true compared to pro sports, and especially so now in the portal era).

It was a bit odd that the last football fans standing in Ohio were the college football fans, after the Bengals narrowly missed the playoffs. Although not that odd, considering that pro football playoff hopes in Ohio were often over by late September before Joe Burrow arrived on the scene. It was something nice to look forward to in the middle of winter, especially with Ohio State playing and the quarterfinals-and-later giving good games.

I think the top-four-seeds-for-conference-champions should be changed, but otherwise am happy with the format for the time being. Give it another year or two and see if any of the nine to twelve seeds win, and if not, maybe shrink it down to 8.

The playoff home games were also fun. I'd be in favor of expanding those to at least the quarterfinals. Sort of unfortunate for the fans of the top 4 seeds to miss out on that experience, and one could argue that an additional home game is as good of a motivation to earn a top seed as a bye.
 
Meanwhile Oregon didn't have any losses, embarrassing or otherwise, and found themselves in a 34-8 hole at halftime after shaking of a month of rust. Where is their second (or third) chance . . ?

There is zero chance they're going to ever shrink the playoffs and it's inevitable that they will be expanded to sixteen as soon as possible (2026 I think?) but to me a nine through twelve seed winning is a strong argument against allowing them in, not in favor. Unranked Michigan proved they were good enough to beat national champion Ohio State, even very late in the season, does that mean they deserve a spot in the playoffs . . ?
 
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