I wonder if the voting breakdown has anything to do with being a fan of a helmet vs non-helmet.
I understand my viewing lifetime has coincided with by far the best run Florida has ever had, but that being said, I do not want an environment in which Florida loses and I shrug my shoulders, knowing we're still in it for the NC. If you're a fan of a helmet (or elite team in your lifetime), you know that feeling of dread and angst on the rare occasion your team loses. If your team peaks at 7-5, you don't know this feeling. It's what made the college football regular season mean something. You knew that once you lost, you'd need some conspiracy theory stuff to happen bam-bam-bam for you to have any way back to the NC...and sometimes it happened!!
But ever since OU got lambasted by KSU in the XIICG that one year and still made it into the BCSNCG, it's all felt wrong. Or I don't know, Nebraska getting pantsed and still playing Miami for the NC, whichever happened first. That was the beginning of this new college football regular season, in which no one loss is particularly damning. Now, you team loses, you shrug. Still in it, still able to achieve all our goals without angels parting the Red Sea.
When/if the playoff expands, we'll enter a third phase of the regular season - the irrelevant games. So many irrelevant games. And maybe that isn't scary to you, but it is to me. 90,000 seat stadiums aren't getting packed now, and with more meaningless games, or games in which the outcome isn't high-stakes, even against legit competition, those stadiums will have more and more empty seats. Fewer eyeballs on TVs.
Every game needs to matter. Every loss should be damning and feel like a stake through the heart. Not because I say so, but because that's how college football became great.
I disagree with much of this, mostly on the grounds that a game outside the national title race leads to irrelevance.
If that's the standard, most games played most seasons are irrelevant. If you try to schedule good teams early, you're hastening your own irrelevance. The flip side of that dread you talk about is that once you lose, it's gone. So it means an individual fanbases' level of buy-in to that dread and such usually dissipates before the halfway mark (You also talk about the seeing a team lose and maybe work its way back in, but setting aside the sort of SEC one-loss mulligan that developed, most of the time that dread breaks with a loss, and you instead find out the team you put a lot of hope in and started a soft 5-0 wasn't all THAT good).
What we're really talking about isn't the in-the-bubble fan experience, but the third-person view of the race, even from within that bubble. We're talking about watching the polls, seeing undefeateds slip up or get picked off. Is that all-or-nothing drama, and the fact we ignore anyone outside the top 10 or so down the stretch, better than more machinations, more sub-races, more moments when a sure seven seed gets dashed by a CCG upset? I dunno.
I'd assume this will not create more irrelevant games. It'll likely create more relevant games, if anything. If winning the B1G West means more, or if UCF games matter beyond being a story many roll their eyes at or if a CCG means a chance to play one's way in, that'll at least balance out things somewhat.
And beyond that, college football makes its own drama because the difference between every kind of record matters. 7-5 feels different than 8-4 which is different than 9-3. When my team was 6-4, I wanted VERY badly for it to knock off a 5-5 Purdue team on the road. This team should be irrelevant, but in my bubble, and probably the Purdue bubble, there was a lot of angst on both sides.
I don't know if an eight-team playoff dampens that. Maybe getting a spot rises to such a level, that goes away. But at the moment, 7-5 teams usually feel some joy getting win No. 8 in a second-tier bowl (y'know, unless they stop trying or something), and I don't know if that will dissipate in the short term.
(I suppose the counter would be something like Clemson-Syracuse this year. That game was marvelous and sublime, but would it have been that way without the vague ability to project ahead and say "I don't know, they could put themselves outside the championship hunt here"? I get that might be lost, but something else might be gained)
