Yes! This is exactly my point. I can barely remember who wins the basketball championship year after year. It almost doesn't matter, because college basketball has lots of levels of success. Programs can hang banners for Sweet Sixteens and Final Fours, despite not winning a championship. That, coupled with the fact that every team knows exactly how they can win a championship before the first whistle, makes college basketball have the best postseason in sports by a pretty fair margin.
I'm not saying that college football needs to copy the tourney. But they should take note that obsessing about winning a championship makes no sense - the goal is get more involvement from more fans for more teams, and the only way to do that is to give everyone something to play for. So, clear paths to the postseason for every team make a heck of a lot more sense than restricting access to the same teams every year.
Here is the thing. I have repeatedly used as my examples of the type of fan that I think we are pushing away three people:
The three are somewhat similar in that they are (or at least were) HUGE CFB fans who root for (graduated from) a school that is NOT a helmet nor would I quite call those schools "Helmet adjacent" like an aTm or Clemson. These are schools for whom winning the NC was never a very realistic possibility. I have a slight disagreement with beta here as I think that a school like Purdue had a plausible NC chance prior to the BCS where he thinks they had no chance but that disagreement is unimportant because we are talking about something like basically 1/10,000 per generation as opposed to 0 per generation. In either case, the chance of winning the NC wasn't really driving CFB fandom among PU/MSU/TxTech fans.
I am of the opinion that losing fans like the three aforementioned guys should be a HUMONGOUS warning sign. We (on this board) aren't "average". Most people and even most CFB fans don't spend time even on team message boards let alone conference message boards. We are the outliers and if changes in the sport are pushing even some of us away, there are issues. The third example, Utee's friend is similar in that he was a TxTech fan who hosted tailgates, and drove something like 12 hours roundtrip to most TxTech home games, etc.
Prior to expansion these three guys believed that their teams had "something to play for". I think I had always kinda assumed that it was that 1/10,000 per generation NC shot but that is probably because I'm a helmet team fan so I think that way. To us (you and me
@MaximumSam ) the NC has ALWAYS been a big consideration in our fandom because we root for a team that is regularly in the NC race and has won a few NC's in our lifetimes as well as multiple prior NC's that they old folks talked about when we were kids. Beta has made it clear in these discussions that his fandom had nothing to do with the miniscule chance that Purdue had at an NC (which he doesn't even believe existed) but he (and ELA and Utee's TxTech friend) DID still follow the sport intensely, why? Well, it seems based on the "things to play for" that their teams did have such as:
- Beating rivals
- Potential to win the conference and thus go to a MAJOR Bowl (see PU 2000)
- Potential to win a MAJOR Bowl
- Chance to upset a Helmet
- Chance to impact the NC race by upsetting a helmet (see MSU, 1998 or PU 2018)
- Chance to win the NC
I left NC chance on the list because I still think it existed but I put it last because it obviously wasn't a primary driver for beta nor probably the others.
So now looking at
@MaximumSam 's quoted post it just feels silly to me because it feels like we are now trying to give them something (a reason to watch) that they ALREADY had and have only been deprived of because of changes that we made. Following Max's logic here the best case scenario is that we get back to where we already were.
Why take the enormous risk of losing guys like the three listed above when the ultimate payoff is no improvement at all?
People have talked about great playoff games and I get that but those aren't really new. We are simply trading important regular season games for important playoff games. We haven't actually gained anything.
In the old days Ohio State's random midseason games were ALL important because a single loss (MSU '98, PU '18, etc) might cost tOSU the NC (or at least a shot at it). Early in this thread
@ELA related a story of a bunch of kids literally NONE of whom were tOSU or IU fans stopping what they were doing (backyard football) to run inside and watch because IU was in tied with tOSU. That type of thing has happend all over the country for decades because for decades EVERY GAME MATTERED. If Ohio State had an off week and lost to IU that might knock them out of the NC. If Bama had an off week and lost to MissSt that might knock them out of the NC. As you expand the playoff you lose that because a single random upset loss no longer has the impact that it used to.
