You have it all backwards.
It's not "screw the little guy" to acknowledge they are playing on an entirely different competitive plane. It's not "screw the little guy" to have the best teams that earn it make the playoff. Letting in teams with bullshit high school schedules goes against everything we know from a competition standpoint. 11-1 and your best win is New Mexico? No, sorry, that's not good enough.
Having the little guy get his head caved in every year isn't screwing him?!? How's that?!?
And "make most of the games meaningless" how?!? Its' better for all the undefeated and 1-loss teams late in the year to not give a shit if they lose, because they're in anyway? Talk about meaningless games!
I can't believe I'm getting flack for wanting teams to earn it. What set college football apart was the urgency of the regular season. That is completely gone now. I want to go back to that. We must not be speaking the same language for you to accuse me of wanting to "make most of the games meaningless."
No, that's what we have now.
And also no, it's not a good thing to have like 15 teams' fans thinking they're still in it, for 'engagement' or 'exciting' purposes. It's bullshit, watering-down of college football. It's lottery ticket thinking. Fuck that. I'm tired of catering to the dumbest, barely-interested "fans." Fuck them.
What ever happened to making your product better in order to attract more fans? Our culture has fallen into a habit of catering to the masses to bring them in, and it's detrimental. Does it work? Does it make 0.2% more money? Sure. You got me. It works.
That doesn't mean it's the best way. Being a whore to the dollar isn't the best way.
OAM,
There is a flaw with your argument. The flaw is, that you are essentially saying that somebody like New Mexico is always bad and somebody like, say Florida, is always good. And I'll concede that 99% of the time, you're right. But you can't just shut every team out who isn't in the SEC or Big 10, and relegate the ACC to Clemson/FSU/Miami and the Big 12 to.....I have no idea who would be the top teams there but we'll go with Texas Tech and Kansas State and TCU.
We always acknowledged that CFB is a flawed sport, and there are too many Div I teams. It's funny because we spent a lot of time arguing about how the regular season won't matter anymore and the playoff will ruin CFB but when somebody like Texas and ND get left out suddenly it's a bad system because.....surprise ! The regular season mattered !
So what if we've got a flawed system....it's always been flawed. Now it's just flawed differently. Personally I have always felt that no team outside of the top 8 stood any chance so I truly could care less if a 9-3 team or 9-2 team gets left out. They were never going to win it anyways. And as far as JMU or Tulane go they played by the same rules that everybody else played by. Every few years a team like Boise State will get good for a few years and get some prime bowl slot and everybody will complain that they didn't play a tough schedule and all that other bullshit but once a team like Boise State gets good nobody will schedule them. We all know Alabama, Florida, Texas A&M, and every other team in the Big 10, Big 12, and ACC really don't want to schedule good teams like Boise State because if they lose, they want to lose to another "equivalent" program. ND lost to the only two "real" teams on their schedule and still almost got into the CFP.
What they really did was find a way to get the #5-10 teams into the CFP, and give a couple of teams a chance to prove they belong, at the same time giving a couple of teams a perceived easy CFP win. Good for Ole Miss and Oregon. They did what they needed to do and are still alive. But they won't always be easy wins, sooner or later somebody will lose to an up-and-comer and it won't be pretty.
