Chiefly, the NCAA has adopted the 4 team college football format for the 2014 season. Without this, Ohio State would have never won the National Championship and I'm sure Alabama was not thrilled at all. In fact, they likely would have beat Oregon, but who knows.
This format was worked out so well for the past 3 years now. Being on our 4 year, we are less than a week away from seeing if new discussion and debate will start brewing over a 8 team format (all ears and eyes on Jamie Samuelson from Detroit's 97.1 "The Ticket" and FOX Detroit Sportsworks).
If all top 4 teams win, the format is solid. If any of those teams loses, we might well be looking at some heated debate. I can only imagine that if the only loss among the top 4 comes from Miami beating Clemson, Miami would only trade places with Clemson. However, if either of Auburn, Wisconsin, or Oklahoma loses (all of which are significantly possible), we are back in the same heated debate we had before the college football playoff (CFP) with the BCS.
I've heard talks of Ohio State battling it out with Alabama if they beat Wisconsin. I'm a HUGE fan of Ohio State and Alabama as well, but a bigger fan of logic. We are all overlooking TCU. If they beat Oklahoma and Ohio State beats Wisconsin, would that not be a serious debate right there. What if only TCU wins? Do we have a debate between TCU and Alabama?
The funny part I LOVE about this is that 5 years ago, I already made the suggestion to award all 5 power conferences a chance at the National Championship with options to include at-large teams.. Upon reviewing this, my selection was for not only all 5 power conferences but also Notre Dame since they were top in the country. Of course, this year they blew that chance in losing to Stanford. Nonetheless, that vacancy is invalid. We should perhaps consider adding another conference to the power 5 conferences (UCF had a pretty good season!). We don't need to though and there are good strategic means of covering all the bases on this. Perhaps, just add only 3 at-large teams?
The complexity of the college football team selection is grand. What if a power-5 conference has little competitive spirit as we've seen with Pac-12 this year and in some former years? If you look at today's 4-team format, they have seemingly rightfully been excluded. Some would disagree. An issue opponents to expanding the field is that it degrades from the worth of the regular season in allowing an "undeserving" opponent to join the field and upset a top ranked team to claim the national title. Ironically, we saw this back in 2011 when LSU rightfully claimed the SEC championship and a spot for the national championship but Alabama was allowed to re-compete for that national championship despite not having won either a conference or division championship. More ironically, they are once again in the same scenario with an opportunity to sneak into the 4 team field.
The problem with the opposition's argument is that ALL other major and collegiate sports follow a playoff format with a vast number of teams competing. Even the NFL allows for 12 teams out of 32 teams. We are essentially saying that among 100+ teams in the NCAA (60 of which are in power conferences) are limited to 4 teams to compete for the national championship? I dare say that 8 teams or more is reasonable.
Perhaps we can throw out some of these cupcake games that these teams play to open up that allotted game space for games that matter---like an at-large game for a chance to play in a bowl game as part of the playoff or just in a bowl game for a chance at the semis and then national championship game.
Well, if that 8+ team idea doesn't sit with you well, we can still surely agree that some unknown and abstract solution be implemented. Maybe it is semi-fluid from year-to-year to fit the NCAA and fanbase needs? Obviously, we are running out of ideas. Maybe all the fans can just vote at the end of the year for who is best or maybe with Trump and the foreign hooligans running afloat we won't need to worry about it for too much longer.
