In Reply to: Re: You are suffering from the delusion that ... posted by SehornBlew on December 20, 2024 at 10:48:04
The old system had the pollsters choose one team that was clearly the best as the national champion. That suffered from the problem that there were occasionally two teams that looked pretty good and didn't play each other (e.g. Michigan and Nebraska in 1997).
The BCS was an improvement in that it ensured that the two best teams played each other and it worked well when there were exactly two teams that stood head and shoulders above everyone else. However, it didn't work when there were 3 teams that could claim to be the best.
The 4-team playoff solved that problem, but left a team like FSU out last year.
The 12-team playoff solves the FSU problem but introduces its own.
The problem is that we're trying to find a one-size-fits-all approach. If your goal is to reward the best team, this year you could just award the title to Oregon without making them play all these other teams. In other years there are two teams that should face off for the title, or maybe have a 3-team round-robin tournament.
Or we could abandon the pretense that it's the best season that matters and accept that it's the best post-season that we're rewarding as we do in the NFL or NBA. Which has the problem that it is too many games for a group of supposed students to play. You could conceivably have done something like old school MLB where only the pennant winners played in the playoffs but with 18-team conferences you can have multiple undefeated teams in each conference now.