Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

Yeah, and they would be the playoff champion.  We would see very good teams getting upset and knocked out obviously.  At some point we'd see a team like say Ole Miss win it all.  Yay.  

The Braves did that this past year, in a sense, although they were a pretty good team in August.   I always ask "What is the objective?"

I don't think that gets discussed nearly enough.

Yeah, and they would be the playoff champion.  We would see very good teams getting upset and knocked out obviously.  At some point we'd see a team like say Ole Miss win it all.  Yay. 

The Braves did that this past year, in a sense, although they were a pretty good team in August.  I always ask "What is the objective?"

I don't think that gets discussed nearly enough.

Because the answer stinks and never changes:  $$$

I'd disagree with that. It's unique in different ways.

Honestly, the way it once was would've never survived our times. The poll era was a product of trust in institutions, and that simply isn't a thing anymore.

The same can be said of football itself.  It's a product of a time before CTE and liability were a discussion.  I don't believe for one second, it will exist in 20 years, in any form similar to what it is now.

So, what in your view is the desired purpose of a playoff of any ilk?

Not what the actual purpose, but the ideal purpose.

Yeah, and they would be the playoff champion.  We would see very good teams getting upset and knocked out obviously.  At some point we'd see a team like say Ole Miss win it all.  Yay. 

The Braves did that this past year, in a sense, although they were a pretty good team in August.  I always ask "What is the objective?"

I don't think that gets discussed nearly enough.

Because the answer stinks and never changes:  $$$

Well, the question about an objective is really what the sport is all about...

Is the sport about student athletes competing, schools, traditions, rivalries, fans, conferences, and bowl games? Is it a diversion from the normal day-to-day of student life and a shared experience for a campus on fall Saturdays, to commune over drinks and grilled meat tailgating before the game and knowing that, win or lose, you were still all Bulldogs or Tigers or Wildcats or whatever. 

Or is the sport about crowning a champion?

If the former, well then the old system worked just fine. Outside of a few programs, college football was FUN. Cheer on your team, hope you got enough wins to go somewhere warm and sunny in late December, or if you really had a good year, Jan 1. Maybe at the end of it a few teams could argue over who was the MNC--the mythical National Champion. And some years, there could be multiple because the AP and the Coaches didn't agree. 

If it's the latter, well, the old system was a beauty pageant. Which is fine, but it's not OBJECTIVE. A tournament playoff, for all its warts, has been considered the objective method to crown a champion in nearly every other sport that exists in the entire world. The BCS was created because they wanted to pit #1 vs #2 to create a "real" national champion. Then it expanded to 4 because some teams were getting left out, and because a 4-team playoff generates a lot more $$$ than an 2-team BCSCG. Suddenly it became ALL that anyone talked about. Nobody cared about conference championships, nobody cared about rivalries, it was all about "who is in and who is out?" And it became apparent that it was all still a beauty pageant and was nowhere near objectively crowning a champion. So we start talking about automatic bids for conference championships, which is one concrete and objective way to grant inclusion to the playoff and make the outcome objective, even if it doesn't crown the "best" team. 

Personally, I want college football to be fun. I don't mind that the national championship is mythical. It's not like Purdue is ever going to win it anyway. Go back to the days when conference championships and warm sunny bowl destinations were the goal. 

But if the world HAS to have an objective National Champion, then make the goddamn playoff system objective. Not this half-ass in-between 4-school beauty pageant instead of the old 2-school or 1-school beauty pageant.

I mean, like I said and bwar echoed, every other team sport at every level in the USA decides the champion via a playoff.  Even football, from peewee league to middle school to high school to college to the NFL, decides its champion with a playoff.  That's scores of thousands of entities at every level competing for the playoff win-- aside from about 120 universities in D1-A/FBS.

And it used to make the sport unique and special.  But now with a half-assed beauty pageant playoff, it's neither unique and special, nor is it objective, as bwar also pointed out.  It's sort of the worst of all worlds now, and it's severely damaging the sport I've loved since before I knew how to properly say the word "football."


(That last bit might be an exaggeration...)