It's not a major issue in this discussion, but I'd say games such as the "Chik-Fil-A" (Peach) on NYE are much more valued than those the post-NYD games such as the ones in SF and Mobile, AL. I'd also knock down NYD games that didn't exist prior to this year a few pegs also.

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I agree. I forgot to put them in my list. I really don't get why they exist there at all. The BCS title game should be tonight or tomorrow.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

At the end of the day, winning a national championship means very little too. At the end of the day, sports is just a fun little diversion.

I don't think I'm being to trite when I say that. A professional sports league's focus on a championship makes sense. Everything is built around attaining a championship. The league puts into place policies designed to make all teams roughly equal over the long run. It's believable to thing every team could win a championship. The whole point of the NFL, or MLB, or NBA (besides from making money) is to find out which team was the best team in that sport that year.

That's definitely not the purpose of college football, and I'm not just talking about "sculpting better men through sports" or any of that treacle. The teams cannot ever be equalized. College football is the paradigm of unfairness. Texas and USC will always make more money and be more popular than Baylor and Stanford. They will always get better recruits. They will always attract bigger audiences. Television networks will always pay more for their games. There is absolutely no competitive balance, and so it will forever be.

That's fine...it is what it is. But that's why different events have more meaning in college sports. When the Bills beat the Patriots, its a fun little diversion, but so what? Those teams should be equal, and in the grand scheme of things, some day, one will be good and the other will be bad, as the giant Wheel of NFL Fortune spins again. When Baylor beats Texas, it is an event. When Stanford beats USC--even when Stanford is expected to beat USC--it is an event (Stanford students rushed the field this year, and they were ten point favorites.) When a school like TCU wins the Rose Bowl, it is an event.

If they weren't events, there wouldn't be college football, at least not like we see it today. Why be a Baylor fan? Why be a Stanford fan? Even if your chances of winning a national championship were the same as Texas and USC, there are 120 schools. Just on pure numbers alone, your team will probably not win the championship during your lifetime. Even worse, your team really sucks, so the odds are even worse than 1/120.

Of course, we can step back and say "there won't be 120 major teams" anymore. No, there'll be some regular, homogenized amount, just like in every other major professional league. We'll have 30 or 32 major colleges that are roughly equal and each have ups and downs, and we'll cheer for those teams based on our geography. Fuck that. I already have the NFL, and the football is better. Crap teams make college football, because sometimes the crap teams win something, and the Baylor kid can make a wanking motion towards some Longhorn a-hole on the way out of Texas Memorial Stadium, and he doesn't have to hear "but you didn't win the championship" or "you didn't make the playoffs." Sometimes, the crap teams even get near the very top, like when they win a bowl game that predates both the championship game by seven decades.

If that still doesn't matter, and every league still has to point towards the same conclusion in the same way with the same tidy bracket structure and tie-breaker procedures and everything else, well, meh. I like different things too, and I don't think this one is so far broken that it needs to be altered. 34 teams will win bowl games, and at the end of the day, it doesn't mean anything to anyone except the players and the coaches and the fans. Then again, I don't know who is left after that.

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Fire Phil Emery

I don't think they are useless. I think they are flawed. I didn't say that winning the NFC Championship is meaningless, I said that if you say everything is championship or bust, that reduces every accomplishment to nothing.

My main problem with playoffs isn't that they exist, it's that they are too damn (7-9 Seattle says hello).

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Fire Phil Emery

Well said Irish Boy.

As another example to show what he is talking about.

The Bears could win the Super Bowl this year and the 2000 Purdue football season would still be my favorite season of sports ever. That will likely never change. They didn't even win the Rose Bowl and I stupidly watched it on television instead of going.

Even in 2007 when the Bears lost the Super Bowl it still didn't register as one of my top 5 worst sports losses.

College football is just different than pro sports. I have a very hard time connecting with pro sports teams. I root for them because I'm a fan and my dad was a fan and my friends were fans. I chose my college team and spent 5 years attending games as a student(one after graduation). I had no loyalty to to them until I went there. It's a lot more personal.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

I see where you are going with this and I totally agree. The focus on one goal as the ONLY measure of success is not healthy... expecially if you happen to be fans of programs with built-in disadvantages. 2004 Wildcat season was a success for me. Being at the game where we beat THE Ohio State University was one of the best sports moments of my life... in a season that was by-and-large disappointing.

I guess where I was going with the post is that the New Years Day games and the bowl games have really degraded into a dick measuring exercise and the volume of bowls dilutes the specialness of the post season. I would gladly give up my school's chances to go to the TicketCity bowl in order to make it more special when we get to the Rose Bowl (let's say once every half century). That would certainly hurt the profitability of our program, but I still think it is the right thing to do.

Don't you think there's a shade of grey here, Mud? For NU, in the past 15 years, I would setup three bowl "categories":

1. Ultimate

Rose Bowl


2. Rewarding / Fun

Citrus Bowl
Outback Bowl
Alamo Bowl (2)
Sun Bowl

3. Not compelling

Motor City Bowl
Ticket city Bowl

I have read through this entire thread and weighed all of the opinions here. I am all for a playoff system and the rest can go to bowl games - they would be like the NIT. Does an NIT birth diminish the recruiting for basketball programs? North Carolina went last year and lost to Dayton. I think the program will be O.K.

My main question is why is it O.K. for EVERY NCAA SPORT, AT EVERY LEVEL to have a playoff system EXCEPT DIVISION I COLLEGE FOOTBALL? The SI feature about bowl games precisely sums it up.

The fact that they played Dayton close is actually a boost to their program. No reason for the Tar Hills to hang their heads for losing to the Flyers.

The NIT is a joke that no one cares about. One of the things that is great about the NCAA tournament is that every team has a legitimate chance to play in the NCAA tournament by simply winning their conference. This would not be true in football unless there was a 16 team playoff.

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You do not talk to me like that! I work too hard to deal with this stuff! I work too hard! I'm an important member of the CSFMB! I drive a Dodge Stratus!

If there is a tournment, I agree that it has to be 16 teams.

I will say I am probably one of the few, but I like the bowl system as is, I watch him all, if I had to change something, I wish more were on New Year's Day, the Cotton should be that day, not this Friday and the GoDaddy, BBVA Compass, and Kraft Macco should have already been played, tonight or tommorow, should be the national title game or it should be played the day after New Year's or like this year this past Monday.

I think if you put the non-playoff teams in a bowl still, who would care about a Capitol One Bowl with Central Florida vs Texas, the Cap One people wouldn't.

See, you hear people say the NCAA tournament is great and I like it too, but is the main reason the tournament itself or that we get to fill out brackets, if you just watched the games and no brackets to fill out, would people still watch or care? You don't hear much about college basketball's regular season untill March, Like with college football, does it come back to the regular season matters, but people don't like the way they find a champion, so that's why they get the biggest complaints?

Would a playoff do well in college football, maybe, but no one has thought of a way to do it and there's so much history with the bowls, there's no reason to change it.

But would you agree there are too many bowls? There was no way I was going to the Ticket City Bowl. And the Motor City/Pizza Pizza Bowl is almost considered comedy... it's almost considered a punishment.

Maybe there are too many, but people watch them and I wonder too how much these bowls help the local economy where they are played, like the Pizza Bowl, I would think Detroit business get some boost.

I like the bowls. I don't like the BCS (but I do like a championship game). I don't like conference tie ins. I don't like a national championship so far removed from new year's day.

If I had the ability to institute my changes:

The championship would be played on the Moday after New Year's Day
No other bowl game would be played after Jan 1
The Orange, Sugar, Rose and Fiesta would be played on New Year's Day (excluding thier championship year)
I'd probably include two other games on New Year's Day
The bowls would begin the Saturday before christmas starting from lowest to highest payouts
there would be a game each night with three on Saturdays and none on Sundays
Seed the teams across the board with 1 against 2, 3 against 4 and so on with no teams from the same conference playing each other

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O judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts,
And men have lost their reason.

Good Dolphin, I agree with yours with some modification, on New Year's Day, have the bowls you have with the bowls that are on New Year's Day, like Outback, Capitol One, Gator.

I don't get the seeding thing, I would just have like the national title game, it picks the top 2 teams, and the Orange gets the 3rd pick, Sugar 4, and so on. Look at this year, Oklahoma State was one of the top teams in their bowl and they played in Alamo Bowl, what if they got to play TCU in the Gator Bowl, that would be a game to watch, you could still have Oregon-Auburn, Rose Stanford-Wisconsin, even though the game looked good going, could have given Alabama-Oklahoma.