What’s Wrong with College Football? Nothing.

Don’t we need a playoff to determine the "National Champion?" No.

That’s right. College football as played at the Division 1A level has never been better. The BCS is fabulous. The money produced by the season-ending bowl extravaganza, along with mandatory scholarship limits, have brought more parity and better financial situations to most major college football programs than ever before. Fan interest has never been higher. Many teams have nearly as many walk-ons as scholarship players.

The fact that there is not a "fair" way to crown a National Champion is irrelevant. Why? Because for the true college football fan it is neither desirable nor necessary. We need to define the true college football fan here in order for those outside this scope to gain an understanding of what this statement embodies.

The college football fan attends games live at the stadium, often times travelling great distances to do so. He sets aside the entire weekend to devote to this experience – pushing everything else aside in order to support his team. One of the highlights of the year is the return trip to ol’ State U and the campus that holds much nostalgia for him. He even travels to support his team at the opponent’s stadium.

The college football fan is a student or graduate of the institution for which he roots, or possibly someone who lives locally and doesn’t have a professional team close by. He refers to the team as "us" and "we." Even if the team isn’t a perennial winner, he reorders his season tickets when the form comes in the mail. You see, he is not just a fan – he is a monetary and emotional contributor to the success of the team and therefore rightfully lays claim to a stake.

The college football fan proudly wears the school’s colors even though any fashion designer of marketing consultant would retch at the thought. He sings the fight song, yells nonsensical phrases like "Go Hokies" or "War Eagle," and chants silly cheers. He plasters his car with flags, stickers and magnets representing his team.

Finally, the college football fan has a major, and overriding, goal for each year – and that is to make a trip to some Southern destination and spend New Years cheering on his team in a bowl game. Sometimes it’s ten years or more between such trips. For others, it’s an annual event. Nevertheless, it is an experience.

Now, let’s contrast this college football fan with two classes of fan I call "TV fans" and "Pro fans." Many millions love to tune in their TVs on Saturdays and feast on a wide array of college football. Likewise, many millions of people follow professional sports avidly.

The TV fan may in fact be very knowledgeable about football. They may tune in every Saturday. Sometimes they set up more than one TV to watch different games simultaneously. Usually, though, this same fan sleeps off his Saturday hangover until noon on Sunday when they tune into the NFL double-header of the day. When college football season is over they watch hockey, basketball, baseball and auto racing without any real letdown. The TV always brings them another competition to watch. They may have their favorite team(s) but they have no financial claim and little, if any, emotional stake in who wins and who loses.

The Pro fan loves to see competition played at the highest level by superstars. They somehow maintain loyalties to the jerseys that their favorite team wears despite the fact that half the players for last year’s team have left to play somewhere else. When egomaniacal owners move the team to another city because they couldn’t extort local taxpayers to make them richer with public funds, the Pro fan finds another team to root for. When the players strike, all is forgiven as long as they eventually return. The Pro fan may indeed pay the outrageous ticket prices and faithfully attend the team’s home games. But they have no ownership stake because they are a mark, not a supporter. If their team doesn’t win the Super Bowl, they demand that heads roll. They have been suckered in by the American media contention that if you don’t win it all then you suck and should be appropriately ridiculed.

The reason one must make these distinctions is singular. If you are truly one of the TV or Pro fans described above, you need read no further in this article. You either wish for more competition to view on the big screen, or you’ve been deceived into believing that all athletic classifications must end with a single "indisputable" champion. In light of these comparisons you will not be convinced that college football does not need a playoff. No amount of reason or discussion will sway you because the foundation of your interest in college football is fundamentally different from that of the college football fan.

The rest of this piece is devoted to the true college football fan, in hopes of clarifying your thinking on the issue of a Division 1A playoff. Your judgement may have been clouded through the rantings of those who have no inherent interest in the sport. You may have been misled into thinking that a playoff is a good thing by the same talking heads that have tagged the Atlanta Braves teams of the 1990s as losers.

Let’s first look at why a playoff system is not desirable.

The critics are absolutely right when they whine, "Every other classification of college sports has a playoff – why can’t Division 1A football?" They have stumbled onto an essential element to this game we love so much, and that is that Division 1A college football is unique. There is nothing else like it in all of sport. You know this, but may not have articulated it before.

What the critics have missed, however, is that there is unprecedented interest in college football. The interest in college football has surpassed that of all the other sports combined, including basketball with its "March Madness." Up to 90% of a Division 1A school’s direct income from athletics is obtained from football. Perhaps the other sports should try the current system in use for football in order to increase their revenues and decrease their financial dependence on football!

Furthermore, no other sport is reliant on fan attendance the way college football is. A basketball venue can be sold out by allocating 2,000 tickets for each of the participants and selling the rest to the public. It doesn’t require a large contingent of travelling fans (10,000 – 20,000) to sell out like a football stadium. Baseball? Soccer? Lacrosse? Please. These are referred to as non-revenue sports for the simple fact that they generate no revenue due to a complete lack of fan attendance. They can afford to have playoffs because they are not concerned about fans. This goes for football at the Division 1AA level and below as well.

Let’s talk about logistics. No other sport requires an entire week for its athletes to recover from a game. So a 16-team playoff requires four weeks to complete. This is the same four weeks that most students complete final exams and go home for a much-deserved semester break. This also extends the season of the top two teams to a possible 16 games total, 25% longer than ever before. The winner will be the team with the least attrition. In other sports a larger (and therefore more fairly selected) field can be chosen because many more games can be played over a long weekend.

The critics are absolutely wrong when they say, "You’re missing out on the excitement from a playoff." Does anyone understand where the week-in and week-out excitement over college football is coming from? It’s coming from the fact that each and every week it’s a playoff to win your conference and get to the best and biggest bowl game.

Let’s also look at the professional leagues. Say "your" team makes it to the Super Bowl. Are you going to get to go see them play in it? Absolutely not. The Super Bowl has become a near-billion-dollar marketing affair designed strictly to maximize television income. If you’re the CEO of a multi-national company or you control advertising dollars for a large corporation, then you’re very important to this event. But if you’re a fan, you can’t even get hotel reservations much less a pair of tickets. You’re no more meaningful to the organizers of this event than the lowest of couch potatoes.

A final point to consider as a college football fan is that a playoff would represent the death knell of the bowls. Since the bowl experience is dependent on travelling fans, the bowl sites cannot be used to host a playoff format. The playoff pundits allow that the answer is to host early rounds at the higher seeded team’s stadium. With that proposal all but possibly the top four bowl games are reduced to completely insignificant events hosting teams outside of the Top 25.

Though many fans budget and scrape together the money to attend a season-ending bowl experience extravaganza, almost none have the means to attend multiple such games. So you are left with the question "Do I spend $2,000 to attend the first round game or do I wait and hope for my team to advance?" The answer is that you wait. Resultantly, the first-round games would be desolate.

It is a certainty that this reduced interest would result in the demise of the lower-tier bowl games. Many people say that there are too many bowl games anyway. However, each year bowls with awesome traditions like the Cotton, Gator, Sun and Citrus host excellent and exciting matchups. Real college football fans absolutely love to watch these games. But these would no longer exist. If you think that they could survive by hosting teams outside the 8 or 16 playoff participants then you are a fool.

Can it be demonstrated that a playoff is necessary? Of course not. In order to demonstrate that such a change is necessary one must answer the questions, "Why is it necessary to crown an uncontested champion? And if it is determined to be necessary is it possible?"

When trying to argue the necessity of a playoff, the critics correctly spout, "The way the National Champion is determined is not fair and does not determine the truly best team." Neither would any playoff system. And still it has not been demonstrated that crowning such a team is essential. Food, shelter and love of family and friends are essential. Determining an undisputed Division 1A national football champion is not.

Even if such a necessity could somehow be established, there stands the impossible task of determining the participants in the playoff. Since there are 114 teams in Division 1A, they cannot possibly play a round-robin schedule. So there is no fair way of incontrovertibly determining who deserves the playoff invitation. It would have to be decided by committee or formula.

One needs to look no farther than the complaints arising from the work of the NCAA basketball selection committee each year to determine that any selection is subjective. (By the way, why in the world should performance in previous years’ tournaments make any difference in selecting this year’s teams?). In fact the BCS system currently in place is more objective, and it is as fair as any other method one could propose to select these teams.

Secondly, the truly best team is not necessarily determined through a single-elimination format. Many champions resulting from such a system are arguably inferior to others, especially ones eliminated in another bracket. This often occurs when the seeding, again done completely subjectively, favors teams in "weaker" brackets. Also, the subjective seeding process is stacked against the lower seeds since the home team in any game has a huge advantage. This is the epitome of unfair. The bowls are played at neutral sites, offering teams much more equal footing in terms of fan support even if one school is geographically closer than the other is.

Now, if a playoff cannot possibly establish a true and uncontested champion, it fails to meet the claims of its incessant promoters. Because a playoff champion would still be only a perceptual one, it is no better than one crowned through a mixture of public opinion and other subjective criteria.

As discussed previously, the advent of a playoff system would kill the bowl system and eliminate the possibility for most college football fans to participate in the bowl game experience. Eliminating this experience would drastically change forever the complexion of college football. It would eliminate something very special and important to the college football fan, something that has existed for nearly a century.

It would worsen the win-at-all-costs attitude that so encompasses professional sports and creeps further into collegiate sports with each passing year. It would prevent tens of thousands of college football fans from riding through the dreaded off-season (where spring scrimmages provide the only interlude from basketball, baseball, hockey and the rest of "those other sports") on a bowl-victory high.

So the burning question is, does a playoff accomplish what the advocates claim? The true college football fan knows the answer is no. Does it irretrievably harm the sport of college football, which is unlike any other sport on earth? The true college football fan knows the answer is yes.

If you want a playoff system, watch pro football. If you absolutely can’t live without a true champion crowned, seek out a qualified therapist. But whatever you do, leave our beloved sport alone.