I'm firmly in the national championships are unimportant camp. If you could go back to convinceing the ADs and coaches that NCs don't really exist, then us fans would have the most fun. I don't know how to make that happen, as the pro sports mentality has pretty much taken over college sports, but it offers the best option for meaningful non-conference games. Coaches would schedule good competition to warm up for the "meaningful" conference games, and wins and losses would still be critically important for fans following the polls. A playoff dampens some of the enthusiasm for the matchup. if you know you can lose a big a game and not affect your chances to win a title, the importance of the big game is diminished.
I have no illusions that this is ever going to happen, but I like living in this fantasy world. I just hope it doesn't become the idiocy that is college basketball, where Big Ten titles are less important than Final 4 appearances.
Hate to enter politics into this, but whatever it's merits, socialism does not equal dictatorship. When I read socialism I assumed you meant revenue sharing - Sweden, believe it or not, is one of the most free nations on earth. What you meant was authoritarianism - which is both China (socialist) and Iran (nutso right wing theocracy).
What about allowing teams that do schedule the 'big games' i.e. OSU/Texas last year, to keep a bigger piece of the TV advertising revenue their game generates? I have no idea how they split up all that money, but the OSU/TX matchup had to generate more ad revenue that UM/EMU.
Scott, Amen. On top of everything else, with no real title the rivalry game becomes the biggest game of the year and it adds to the intensity. I think the lack of a title is a major reason why college football has better rivalries than any other sport.
Dave, that's what I said in the prior entries comments thread - the networks should give out more money for good games and the conferences should parcel it out based on schedule.
Would reducing the number of teams in the playoff to 4 sufficiently maintain the tension of the regular season, while creating a new, fun playoff tension?
The only way to get a paradigm shift here is for the fans to demand it, thus making it more profitable than the current "one winner and 116 losers" foramt. This means that first you have to (A) convince the fans that the NC is truly "mythical" and hence bad for the overall sport and then get them to (B) put their money where their mouths are. Nielsen needs to see that people are tuning into key conference games and maybe not caring as much about the NC game. Maybe I'm in pipe-dream land here. We'll see if Rupert Murdoch is as effective a marketer as Mickey Mouse. Maybe if Fox screws up badly enough, things will turn around...
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