The big change?
The top-ranked team will play the fourth-ranked team and the second-ranked team will face the third-ranked team in the two bowls selected as the semifinals this season, the Rose and the Sugar, on Jan. 1. The No. 1 team will be placed in the bowl where it has more of a home-field advantage. A rotating cast of six bowls — the Cotton, the Fiesta, the Orange and the Peach, in addition to the Rose and the Sugar — will host the semifinals, to be played each season on Dec. 31 or Jan. 1. The winners will play for the championship on the first Monday that is at least six days after the semifinals, at a site selected in advance through a bid system. This season, the final will be Jan. 12 at the Dallas Cowboys’ AT&T Stadium, 15 miles from the playoff committee’s office. During the season, nine of the committee members will be subject to leaving the room if universities with which they have financial relationships come up for a vote. Hancock, a former director of the N.C.A.A. men’s basketball tournament, said he was not concerned that recusals would hurt teams. It is hard to believe that, say, Pat Haden, the athletic director at Southern California and a committee member, would have agreed to participate if he were worried it would hurt the Trojans’ chances of making the playoff. “Their mission, of course, is to select the best four teams,” Hancock, who is not a member of the committee, said. According to playoff guidelines, the committee will emphasize criteria including win-loss records, strength of schedule, conference championships, head-to-head results and results against common opponents. It will have access to video and advanced statistics like rushing yards adjusted for opponent. “I think we can all look at statistics, strength of schedule, facts,” said Wisconsin Athletic Director Barry Alvarez, a committee member who coached the Badgers for 16 seasons. “I think some of us — myself, Tyrone Willingham, Tom Osborne — have made football our living, so maybe we watch film a little more differently than someone who writes football and knows football but really hasn’t studied it.” Emphasizing strength of schedule could favor multiple teams from a particularly competitive conference or even a conference division. On the other hand, giving conference championships more weight could make the committee lean toward limiting each conference to one team in the bracket. “I would hope that no conference would have two teams in the four,” said Lloyd Carr, who coached Michigan for 13 seasons and is not on the committee. The playoff appears to have encouraged teams to compile tough out-of-conference schedules; Louisiana State, for instance, is opening the season against Wisconsin at a neutral site. Some have also suggested that the rules will propel the Big 12, composed of only 10 teams, to reintroduce a championship game. It would be hard to find anyone arguing that the playoff is not an improvement over the B.C.S., although Alabama Coach Nick Saban, who won four B.C.S. titles (one with L.S.U.), told reporters last month that the B.C.S. “usually got it right.” Still, doubling the number of playoff teams intrinsically produces a more competitive bracket, and there is hope that the committee will be wiser than the computers. But to argue that four teams are better than two begs a retort: Aren’t eight teams better than four? “I haven’t been asked that question in the past 20 minutes,” Hancock said last month. Not surprisingly, most observers assume expansion is foreordained. “We all know it’s coming,” Danielson, of CBS, said. Danielson said he favored a system with six teams, two with a bye, but also expressed concern that too much expansion could hurt the game. Mack Brown, the former Texas coach, said he would prefer 10 teams, two with a bye. “You’d like to see a team that gets upset early have a chance,” he said. Hancock said he strongly doubted there would be more than four teams in the playoff during the course of its current 12-season deal with ESPN, a contract worth about $5.6 billion “Any contract could be changed,” he said. “But all the parties”— the 10 Football Bowl Subdivision conferences and Notre Dame — “would have to agree unanimously. Defenders of limiting the playoff say expansion would dilute the regular season. In the current format, every game matters. Exhibit A, these supporters point out, is college basketball, which has an extremely popular 68-team championship tournament and, partly as a result, a regular season that allows for multiple losses along the way. Expansion could also sap interest in other bowl games — angering the officials of those bowls, who are stakeholders in the current arrangement — and perhaps even conference championships. And it would require playing games during exam periods or pushing the final game to the third Monday of January. “We respect class time,” SEC Commissioner Mike Slive said last month. “The cynics will throw that back in our face, but the reality is, we’ve been able to do this playoff without disrupting the current structure.” Still, even the current system may stretch fans thin. Would a die-hard Ohio State supporter have the time or money to attend the team’s annual final-weekend game against Michigan, the conference championship game in Indianapolis and a national semifinal in New Orleans or Pasadena, Calif., before the final in Texas? Then there is the toll on teams. In all likelihood, one or two teams will play 15 games this season: 12 regular-season games, a conference championship game, a semifinal and the final. Several teams may face the possibility of four straight win-or-go-home games. Alabama, for example, would need to beat Auburn in the Iron Bowl, claim the SEC championship in Atlanta the next weekend and win a semifinal less than four weeks later. The Crimson Tide would then play for the title 11 days after that. An extensive college football playoff is not unheard-of. Football Championship Subdivision conferences — the Big Sky, the Colonial Athletic Association and others — hold a 24-team, five-round playoff every year. Rutgers Coach Kyle Flood, an assistant on the 2003 Delaware team that won the F.C.S. championship, is torn. “I have seen the excitement it generates on college campuses with the fans,” Flood said of a playoff. “I love it.” Yet, he added, “the bowl experience, for the players, is a tremendous experience.” This was a constant refrain: A playoff atmosphere is more intense but, well, less fun than the atmosphere of bowl games, which involve a week of activities. “If we’re going to go anywhere, I’d rather go back to the old bowl system,” Dan Beebe, a former Big 12 commissioner, said, referring to the pre-B.C.S. system. For the most competitive coaches, though, there is nothing better than having an undisputed champion. “I’m not a big ‘fun’ guy,” Ohio State Coach Urban Meyer, a two-time B.C.S. title winner with Florida, said when asked about the charm of the bowl games. “The national championship, that’s fun to me. Disneyland and all that’s cool, too. But I like playing for titles.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/24/sports/ncaafootball/bcs-makes-way-for-new-debates.html |