Do we really need a four team playoff?

[The Big Red Lebowski]

I'll give you that.....because you are talking about not removing them from the pool. But let me ask you something. Would anything change? All it is doing is delaying the playoff by one more game. If we haven't figured out who the top two are after the non-conference season, conference and conference championship games will doing it after the bowl games do anything more to gain consensus? How long before fans would want to expand it to 4 teams and then 8 again.

In my view, college football's biggest mistake over the past 25 years has been butchering the traditions that made it unique. The Big 8/Big 12 merger cost us Nebraska v. Oklahoma, once arguably the marquee rivalry in all of college football and at worst third behind Michigan and OSU and Army-Navy.

College football's showcase used to be New Year's Day. I'm being totally honest in that I don't even know who is playing whom tomorrow. A plus one would have protected the traditions of Jan. 1 bowl games and avoided the split titles that sunk the conference tie-in system in the first place.

I agree with you that regardless of system, it would still be Alabama vs. Clemson in the championship. I'm mostly just soured on the playoff and college football in general, because I'm just so freaking tired of Alabama.

The scary part about 'Bama is that Saban just recently figured out that there is no rule requiring Alabama to field a vanilla offense with a statue QB in the mold of Jay Barker or AJ McCarron. With a dynamic, dual threat QB at the helm, they are going to be like 1995 Nebraska every single year.

 

[Husker Country Doc]

Would some NFL team PLEASE hire Sabin, and break up that monopoly?

 

[katymac]

I've watched about 5 bowl games this year and I know the playoffs are not going away. I will watch more games when the playoffs expand to 8 teams. I'm just upset we can't watch the huskers in a bowl game.

 

[Middle-aged_Ball_Coach]

But many years there may be 3 teams that have a legitimate claim. Or 5 teams. Or maybe there are 3 teams that are championship caliber, but they each have one loss. And there's one undefeated team, but they really haven't played anyone (e.g. UCF).

To make it more personally meaningful, I like to look back at past years, and how the current system would have affected Nebraska. We would have had meaningful shots at making a NC game in 1978, 1982, 1987, and 1999. I think that we would have had a very good chance of winning out in '82 and '99, and we probably would have had similar results in '78 and '87 to what actually happened (losing the bowl games). Taking 8 teams would have opened up 'a much larger number of Osborne's years, and we probably had a decent shot of coming out on top in '84 and '96.

Name one year since 1936 (the start of the AP poll) -- or any year for that matter -- when there were 8 teams with a legitimate claim to #1.

Good point, and I've thought back as much as possible, and the one year that seems reasonable would have been 1984.

Three of the 4 major bowls at the time (Cotton, Orange, Rose, and Sugar) had a hand in determining who was National Champion. Both Notre Dame and Stanford were giant killers that year and would not have made a 4 team playoff and Stanford would not have made an 8 team playoff.inished #3 behind #1 Texas and #2 Ohio State in the UPI (coaches poll) which at the time did not conduct another poll after the bowl games. In 1974, UPI b

I don't know how many times this has happened in college football history. I suspect not very often but I don't like the idea that it may never happen again.

Nebraska could have won a NC in 1981 (if they beat Clemson) because of this type of scenario, and Miami won the NC in '83 because an undefeated #2 Texas got beat by Georgia in the Cotton Bowl, and #4 Illinois got beat by UCLA in the Rose Bowl. (Everybody ignored Auburn who got beat early in the season by Texas and won a meaningless Sugar Bowl.) It was more common that you had multiple teams who had legitimate claims to be the best but hadn't played each other in the bowl games.