Without a Playoff, College Football is the Ultimate Media Sport

The fabric of college football would change forever if there were an 8-team playoff at the end of the season. Since the BCS began, and before that to some extent, analysts have sat at the round table debating who should be ranked where and why. The significance of the rankings are more important than ever with only the top two teams playing for the National Championship. The top ten teams in the country have at least some argument that they got the shaft in the rankings.

If there was a playoff system instead of the BCS, the college football season would be similar to the NFL Power Rankings. How much stock do we put in the NFL Power Rankings? Not too much. It's nice to fill the time between Sundays, but it doesn't mean a whole lot. Everyone knows that things will be settled on the field in January - not by some ranking system based on who you played and the point differential of the past few games.

As it stands now, there is such a public opinion aspect to college football. Two-thirds of the BCS system is by rankings. Why? All the voters don't sit and watch the games every week. Even that wouldn't be the answer. The way it works now is a late-season loss prevents a team from playing in the championship game. That's a certainty. But a loss in the first week or two gives a team a long-time to work back up the charts to play for the title. That's a huge flaw in the system.

How about Hawaii this year? They are on outside of being in a BCS bowl game period. Don't even talk about the National Championship game. I'm convinced it would take Hawaii going 12-0 and every team ahead of them in the rankings, including two-loss Georgia and Michigan, losing at least another game to drop below Hawaii. You can preach strength of schedule all day long, but that's an excuse, not a reason. Any undefeated team, whether it's Hawaii, Texas or Central Connecticut State, should have a chance for a National Championship. There are 35+ teams in Division I football that don't have a chance to win the National Championship going into the season. But we love to talk about the possibility. All day, every day from August until December there is talk about who should be ranked higher and whose impressive win was more meaningful.

The media loves the way college football is set-up now. There's total ambiguity with many great teams that never play each other during the given season. We decide between a ton of 1-loss teams by who they played, how much they won by and their historical level of success. An 11-1 Notre Dame would have more clout than an 11-1 North Texas squad. College football is the ultimate "Homecoming Queen" sport, based on popularity and reputation. It needs to be changed but, in a way, would be strange if it were different.