From: acdendy@lims02.lerc.nasa.gov (ROGER DENDY)
Newsgroups: rec.sport.football.college
Subject: Re: Proposed Playoff system (long)
Date: 18 Dec 92 18:10:00 GMT
Organization: NASA Lewis Research Center
News-Software: VAX/VMS VNEWS 1.41

In article <BzF02v.EGC@acsu.buffalo.edu>, v262xxve@ubvmsd.cc.buffalo.edu (Timothy C Pitts) writes...
>Since the proposals for playoff systems keep coming up time and again and
>all suffer from the same problems (IMHO), I will break my vow of silence
>on the issue and address the current flawed proposal.

Good news.  A thoughtful comment is always better than avowed silence.

>A bowl game is a reward for a good season,
>both for the players and the fans of the team.  Fans have the ability to
>arrange week-long vacations at these sites and the trip culminates with the
>final ball game of the year for the team.  Your proposal sends teams all
>over God's green earth with no provision for fans to follow.

My proposal provides several opportunities for fans to see their teams in 
post-season play, in any of several locations.  It may be difficult for 
fans to follow their team to every site, but it will greatly increase the 
chances for a fan to A) choose a location they can afford to travel to and 
B) get a ticket.

>Perhaps this 
>would be a television bonanza, but it would hardly ``preserve the existing
>bowls'' as they would probably go bankrupt, unless you provide them some
>proceeds from the later round matchups.  If you wish to have a proposal
>that would be financially stable in the early rounds, you must have either
>home-field advantage or local bowl games for the participant teams.

A television bonanza is what keeps bowls from going bankrupt.  Presumably 
there would be some sort of revenue sharing between the later round bowls 
and the early round bowls.  And to increase gate revenues, home fields (or 
near home fields) are arranged when possible (e.g. A&M in El Paso and 
Dallas, Miami in Tampa, Miami, and Miami).

>#  I reason that since currently 36 
>#teams go to bowl games, a playoff system ought to include 32 teams, so as 
>#to offer nearly as many schools the chance for post-season play.
> 
>This is a problem with every one of the proposals that come down the line:
>why do they all assume we need so many teams in the playoffs?

My problem with most of the proposals that come down the line is that they 
either 1) make the NYD games anticlimactic by adding a Post-Bowl game in 
January or 2) dump the bowls altogether and only allow 8 or 16 teams the 
chance for post-season play.  This proposal does neither.

>  Certainly
>after 11 games we will have eliminated enough teams to not need this many
>entrants in the playoffs.  Besides, making the field smaller will allow one
>to actually ``preserve the existing bowl structure.''  It seems to me that
>rarely do we really consider more than 4 or 5 teams real contenders for the
>national championship, so why do we need to have a playoff that encompasses
>6 times that number of teams?

Because the point of post-season play is not solely to determine a national 
champion.  It is to reward teams for having good seasons.


>*Five rounds*, you mean five more games for each team?

No, only for the best two teams.

>  Why in God's name 
>do we need to have the teams play nearly 50% more games than they do already 
>to crown a champ?  No other sport in the world requires that many games as 
>a proportion of games played in the regular season to crown a champion.

No other sport has so many teams and so few regular season games.  This has 
always been the root of the problem, and there are only two solutions:  let 
the best teams play more games against each other, or look at the games 
they do play and extrapolate.

>But we could also have gotten a reasonable champ the last two years by
>simply restructuring the bowl to force the right matchups.

The Bowl Coalition goes a long way toward this, but the fact that there are 
four undefeated teams now shows that this still isn't enough.

>Most years
>provide similar situations and there could be in place some playoff system
>played on Christmas in those years when there are three or four teams that
>are deserving going into the bowls.

Call it the Ad Hoc Bowl.

>  For example, a Christmas doubleheader
>featuring Miami against Texas A&M and FSU against Alabama could lead into
>a NYD matchup between the winners in the Sugar and the losers in the Cotton.

This sounds like a reasonable approach, but the politics of it look sticky.

>No other bowls need be affected (save moving ND to the Orange)--and there
                                       ^^^^^^^^^
				Here's the sticky point.

>would be a boon to travel agents as they provide trip packages that are 
>contingent on the bowl each team goes to!

I still think my tournament provides much more business for travel agents, 
not to mention host cities.

>  Note that these games are 
>unnecessary in most years.  I also propose that extending the regular 
>season to twelve games with no ``extra'' games for any teams would eliminate 
>a decent proportion of the remaining undefeated teams in most years.

Except for two out of four this year.


>The Bowl Coalition is a step in the right direction, IMHO, Mr. Dendy's playoff
>proposal is one in the wrong direction.

The right direction is providing good matchups in bowl games.  The right 
direction is determining a National Champion on New Year's Day.  The wrong 
direction is extending the season into January.  The wrong direction is 
excluding teams which would go to bowls under the current system.

The Bowl Coalition is a step in the right direction.  Mr. Pitts system 
would be another small step in the right direciton, and would solve the 
problem in some years.  But it is not comprehensive, and situations would 
arise which it doesn't account for.  Adapting the system on an ad hoc basis 
depending on the AP rankings of teams at the end of the season leaves too 
much power in the hands of the voters.

R Dendy
Organization: Freshman, H&SS general, Carnegie Mellon, Pittsburgh, PA