Changes to the CFP

If P5 schools had to shorten their seasons by two games to allow for the possibility of playing 4 extra games, the added revenue of two earlier rounds might not make up for 60 schools playing 2 less games.

Happens all the time in UIL playoffs and nobody seems to have a problem with it. The cream rises.

The only change I want to see in the CFP is its abolishment. Until the NCAA takes over the FBS Football championship and attaches the NCAA moniker to it, there will be no national champion.

My big beefs are 1. what we have is not an NCAA sanctioned champion although the NCAA tacitly goes along. I wonder how much it costs the CFP to keep the NCAA on the leash? 2. Humans decide who gets in. 3. There aren’t enough participants.

I posted my take ad nauseum on another thread but here is what I like boiled down:

  1. Conferences can still exist but have no bearing whatsoever on who gets in the playoffs.
  2. Playoff teams are determined by an objective formula that, at the end of the day, is a combination of winning percentage and schedule strength.
  3. There should be a 28 team playoff. 4 regions, #1 seed based on point 2 above has 1st round bye.
  4. Regular season becomes 10 games. Maximum games played would be 15 - 10 regular season + maximum of 5 playoff games.
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Attendance is on a downward trend.

Its time to grow the game by making the post season more entertaining.

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Attendance is on a downward trend.

Attendance has been on a downward trend for year because a) ticket prices are high and b) more games than ever are televised.

Simply making changes to the post-season aren’t going to change either of those two.

They should. I was on a high school team that went 0-5 in non-district and won three games in district. We went to the playoffs at 3-7.

Humans will always determine who plays for the title. It should be the ones who are actually talented and putting in the work, not the ones who are making all the money.

Most of the land is state owned, the capital is state owned or donated, and the labor is compensated by alternative means. Nobody should be making billions on such an artificial micro economy.

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  1. That’s a pie-in-the-sky concept. Everyone knows the SEC is going to product a better team than the Sun Belt 99.9% of the time.
  2. Objective formulas was a hallmark of the BCS computer rankings.
  3. There will never be a 28 team playoff because you would have to shorten the regular season which means a lot of programs (even ones that dont make the playoffs) will have to shorten their home game schedule by 1-2 games every year and also eliminate conference championship games which also drives down revenue.

Where does ND fit into this new format? Is there room for independents?

Nope, they need to get off the pot and join a conference as does Army, BYU, and now New Mexico.

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I know that it is beside the point. But ND is not a true independent as they are obligated to schedule 5 ACC opponents a year and will receive a full share of the ACC network revenue.

But if ND are not in the conference championship game how would they get in

BCS also considered the polls which are neither formula based or objective regardless of what the voters say. The good part of the BCS was that it did at least try to incorporate objective formulas. The bad is that only two teams were selected.

Not saying it will ever happen. NCAA is bought and paid for in this regard so it would take a complete overhaul of the governing body which isn’t likely. NCAA claims Fairness is one of their missions and the way the FBS champion is decided makes that laughable.

It would almost take a mafia-like “offer they can’t refuse” to get the NCAA to step up and take over like they should have 70 or more years ago.

So all you guys are right that eventually we’ll have 8 teams and maybe some conferences get autobids. Who knows what perverse methodology will come with the next “playoff” scenario. Only sure thing is it still won’t be fair because a fair playoff requires a shorter regular season so about 100 schools will lose revenue any given year. That’s what it boils down to. That and the big bowls fearing that they will lose their license to print money.

The counterargument is that if all FBS schools had an equal chance of making the playoffs it could possibly level recruiting somewhat and even the playing field considerably, over time. Kind of like free-agency did for pro sports(imperfect analogy, I know so don’t take it too far).

So yeah, the years you don’t make the playoffs you lose some revenue but the years you make it could more than compensate.

Even if what you say comes to pass, and the playoffs expand to 8 teams. I don’t see why anyone would approve a reduction in season and associated loss of revenue.

All teams will not have an equal chance of making the playoffs, so not every team can make the playoffs, recruiting will still be highly influenced by name and history, basically the top programs are likely to still keep making playoffs while the mid and smaller players are still going to be mostly left out.

Programs that make the playoffs multiple times will have a huge revenue advantage over those that don’t. Recruiting, will keep the playing field from being level. If anything teams that make the playoffs often will keep increasing the revenue gap with the the schools that don’t.

To give every school an equal chance of making the playoffs in a given period of time, you will need to institute a draft, in other words do away with recruiting completely.

With an 8 team playoff, you wouldn’t need to reduce the regular season, but maybe a conference championship game would have to go. That would then be a 15 game season for the two teams in the championship.

But your right that to be fair requires more teams and fewer regular season games. Very problematic and would take people with the best interests of the all schools and players at heart to work it out.

There’s a sore lack of such people at the NCAA, CFP, networks, and universities now.

After this last season, the CFP isn’t a true playoff, it’s an invitational. I’m sorry, if you’re not even good enough to win your own division, let alone conference, you don’t deserve to make a playoff. Period, end of story. You have to draw a line somewhere. Bama, you were good, but when it mattered, Auburn was better.

I like the idea of a conference champions only CFP as well. It puts more emphasis on a conference championship.

We rarely get to see inter-sectional games anymore. You’re not going to see an SC-Bama or Michigan-ND games except on rare occasions. Remember when OU-UT was an inter-sectional game? I also like that a conference champion, determined on the field, takes human bias out of it. That includes computers. Computers have the bias of the programmer that wrote the system.

If you have a conference that plays a nine game schedule and a conference championship, their winner makes the tournament. By doing that you can see big games play OOC. Why? Because it won’t affect a school’s chance to make the playoff because they can still win conference. And it gives a school a better chance to make the playoff, rather than by invitation. Earn it on the field, not the CFP boardroom. Seriously, what about those SEC games in November where they play the little sisters of the poor?

Like the NFL or not, at least you know before the season starts, what it takes to make the playoffs. Can you imagine if the the NFL had a board room and a third place team in a division made the playoffs and a division champion didn’t because an NFL committee thought the third place team was better?

The only human element I would leave in is seeding of the teams for the playoff. Most years, the P5 schools get the top five seeds. What about independents? Make them a quasi-conference. Make them play one another. Force ND to count as part of the ACC for their birth. No ACC champ and ND. One or the other. Let’s see how long ND stays independent then.

Lower seeds( 6-11, 7-10, 8-9) play one another, top 5 schools get a bye. Play a first round playoff in mid December. Quarter final games are the New Year’s Day bowls. Semi-Finals the week after that (the two NY-6 Bowls not used for quarter finals) and a final CFP game the week between the NFL conference championships and the Super Bowl.

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Yes, making changes to the post season would increase demand. Increased demand results in higher attendance.

Perhaps an intelligent marketing department will pick up on the idea that higher volume and lower prices creates more revenue than lower volume and higher prices. Once every seat is accounted for the prices can be raised incrementally. The current trend of gouging the diehards is a short term solution.

Price isn’t the main reason people buy a product, it’s the main reason for complaints, however.

Customers buy a product because it meets their needs in quality and the vendor delivers on time.

So I have no problem with ticket prices the way they are but if the product doesn’t meet our needs (as in we have another mediocre season with a bowl loss to the MW), then 2019 prices will have to come down to compensate for a mediocre product.

There is such a thing as price elasticity. Especially when we can watch most games on tv.