On Tuesday, the BCS Presidential Oversight Committee announced plans for college football to begin a four-team playoff starting in 2014. Within moments, the sports world exploded with college football higher ups, contributors and fans proclaiming the moment we have all been waiting for was finally here. Now anyone with a brain knows a four-team “playoff” is better than the current system in play, but this is far from a ground-shattering moment. In fact, the moves college football have made to get to this point have (and will take) hardly been positive.
It is no secret that sooner rather than later, college football will be comprised of four, 16-team “Super Conferences” that will effectively control the sport. It is yet to be seen if other conferences will exist in the top collegiate level of the sport, but isn't that kind of a moot point as all those programs will have no shot of being a part of this four-team playoff no matter how good they may be anyway? We have already seen the beginnings of that panic with Pittsburgh and Syracuse leaving all their natural, long-time rivals to go play in the ACC for example. TCU originally committed to the Big East, but was so panicked by Syracuse, Pittsburgh and even West Virginia leaving they bolted for the Big 12 before ever playing a game in the conference. Let’s face it, it will only get uglier and messier as the available slots in these conferences continue to dwindle. The Big East knows they are effectively dead in the water which has caused them to make some really silly moves. Boise State and San Diego State in the Big East? Come on! Not only does it tell you how desperate the conferences are, but how desperate Boise State is that they would join the Big East with the slim hopes of it becoming one of the Super Conferences.
What do the Super Conferences mean for the four-team playoff system? My guess is that after the four conferences fully form, the committee would take the conference champion from each of the four. That will leave a big number of programs who want to play in the FBS (or whatever The Artist formally known as Division I-A calls itself then), but cannot because the four conferences are full. If they don’t get into a Super Conference now, when will they ever? The door may be permanently shut on any program outside the top 64 from ever developing a prominent football program. Every once and awhile a conference may kick out a suffering program for someone new, but that will be quite rare. Also is four out of 64 a fair playoff anyway? The varying schedules even amongst teams in the same conference will be pretty stark.
If this is truly where we are heading, college sports will never be the same. Anything improves football from the current BCS system, but at what expense? College basketball is becoming an afterthought in all this movement. The Big East sports the best basketball in the country with several great rivalries. Syracuse was a charter member with the Carrier Dome perhaps being the biggest symbol of the league. They had several great rivalries with the likes of Georgetown, Connecticut, Villanova, Pittsburgh, St. John’s, etc. that are all but gone now because they are trying to secure their spot in a super conference. You may say to me wasn't the Big East the original "super conference" with its 16 teams in hoops? That is true that maybe they should have seen this coming and that other conferences might follow suit and poach them, but all the rivals I speak of for Syracuse were all fellow charter members or close to being that. And remember that the reason why the Big East went to 16 was because the ACC had just poached Miami, Virginia Tech and Boston College, so the only way for them to survive was to become a mega college hoops conference. It hardly destroyed the game and kept rivalries intact after football yanked charter member, Boston College, away.
The Kansas-Missouri rivalry will never be the same either. I’m sure they’ll play a game at the Sprint Center in Kansas City every year, but it loses a lot of its luster with the teams being in different conferences now. This is only the beginning of these types of separations, so who knows what other rivalries will be destroyed. I also failed to mention that even rivals remaining in the same conference will play fewer games against each other over time because of the stark number of teams. There will even be years where teams within the same conference may not even play each other. The small, intimate feel of what a conference should be is gone.
So with all of this, do you still think this is an epic moment for college football? The only reason why it is such an improvement for college football is the last system was so bad it was unconscionable. How could a sport’s championship game be decided by biased pollsters and computers? It was everything sports shouldn’t be. How it even existed for as long as it did is comical. It has kept big sports fans like me from engaging in college football my whole life because of how flawed and negatively it impacted the sport. That’s a shame too because the college football atmosphere is incredibly special. The best scenario is an eight or twelve team playoff. You give automatic bids to the top six conferences (as they were before all this super conference type movement) and then hand out at-large bids from there. For those saying there isn’t enough time to do it, I ask why do the other levels of college football have larger playoffs?
Let’s be realistic though. College football will not expand beyond four teams for a while. Think about it. It took over a hundred years to get them to move beyond two. For those who desperately wanted to see the BCS get the boot, you got your wish. Believe me, I’m happy about that myself, but there are a ton of negatives here. This is not the ground-shattering moment the college football bigwigs, commentators, fans are trying to make you believe it is. Quite frankly, it's like putting lipstick on a pig.
