I know there are some other sports fans on here, and I thought a discussion thread might be fun, and Monday is the natural day coming after the weekend football (both varieties) games and without a side thread scheduled. What's going on with your favorite teams/players/etc? What fun media controversies in the microcosm of sports can tell us something about the broader world? What culture war bullshit do you want to discuss in a sporting context?
FiveHourMarathon You can get anything here except red ink
1yr ago
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MONDAY MORNING MOTTErBack SPORTS THREAD
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TLDR: College football. 4 Team playoff good. NIL bad. Conference expansion bad and we need to get congress to fix it.
Viewership is still great AFAIK, but it seems like there are a lot of problems and complaints from the fans about the direction of College Football and I personally find it worrisome. Wondering what other people’s thoughts are and potential ideas for how they could be solved.
Playoffs. Basically, I think the playoffs are pretty much perfect the way they are. The allure of college football to me has always been how different it is from American pro sports. There are ~130 teams vying for a tiny postseason, and there are no artificial methods of creating parity like a salary cap or the draft. This makes the regular season extremely high stakes since you can only have one bad week and still hope to make the playoffs. Every major upset has a ripple effect throughout the sport for the remainder of the season. This makes it so that the regular season is the playoffs. Ohio State might have all 5 star recruits but they have one brutal loss to Purdue or Iowa and their playoff hopes are gone. This makes it so the championship winner is always the actual best team, as you have to be nearly perfect to make it, there are no situations like the 9-7 Giants winning the Super Bowl. A lot of people disagree with this and don’t like that there’s not a clear path to playoff but I think that’s what makes the sport so much fun. Every game matters, and expanding the playoffs will only dilute that. I don’t think the committee is actually biased, and the constant dickriding of G5 teams on Reddit is ridiculous. If they actually show on the field that they are a top 4 team they will make it as we saw with Cincinnati last year. I don’t think merely going undefeated against a shitty schedule should be a guaranteed playoff spot, the same people who beg for undefeated UCF with the 100th ranked schedule to make the playoff complain when Alabama plays one FCS team or Clemson makes it after going undefeated in the ACC. If Alabama could somehow play an AAC schedule where they’d go undefeated, winning every game by 40, the same G5 dickriders would say their schedule was too weak. The 4 team playoff has not produced any truly controversial winners and out of the 3 playoff games every year at least 2 are blowouts. There are almost never more than 3 teams who are legitimate contenders and expanding to 12 teams won’t change that.
NIL/Recruiting/Transfers. I found the constant guilt-tripping about the poor players not getting paid to be really annoying, and generally I think the players benefit much more from the school than the school does the players. At the same time, it seems unfair that players weren’t allowed to sell their own autographs or anything so NIL seems fair enough to me in theory. But as literally everyone could’ve predicted, it provides a way for boosters to openly pay players in a way that was under the table before, and players are surely getting paid much more now than when it was in secret. Many people complain about the positive feedback loop that is college football recruiting. Many schools have natural advantages in location, resources, history of success, etc. but recently the most successful teams just keep stockpiling more and more talent. People see NIL as a way to mitigate that, where schools with a lot of wealthy boosters can improve their teams recruiting by paying for recruits. But why is that good? I think the fact that success begets success in college football is a good thing, it’s unique in American sports at least and rewards you for running a successful program and hiring good coaches. If the other schools are mad that Nick Saban is getting all the recruits then hire your own Nick Saban. It’s not like it’s impossible to break into the elite of recruiting, Dabo Swinney did it very recently during the Saban era. I don’t see how rewarding teams for having rich boosters is better than rewarding teams for being successful and investing in the program. With the free transfers and NIL, college football success gets even further removed from the on-field results. Even for the lower tier teams a school like Cincinnati could have been able to capitalize on their success in the recruiting market, but that only becomes harder when worse programs with more resources can just throw money at the players. I don’t know how this can be fixed since I don’t think the NCAA would be able to regulate what is “real” NIL vs pay-for-play, but I think it’s really bad for the sport.
Conference Realignment. Nobody seems to support it but the incentives are what they are and it seems that some sort of consolidation into a super-league is inevitable. It seems like this is the least controversial issue in that everyone hates it. Nobody wants to see UCLA in the Big Ten. My only hope is that the consolidation leads to fragmentation again, when the conferences become so geographically nonviable that we can see a “Big Ten Pacific Division” or something that’s basically the old Pac 12. But my radical solution that will never happen and probably isn’t feasible is to get congress involved! This could be the bipartisan issue that unites the country around a common goal. The red team loves college football and tradition, and doesn’t want to see the once-great regional conferences marginalized. The blue team can say why are we spending all this money to fly college athletes across the country when we had perfectly good regional conferences, and we can’t expect the USC women’s volleyball team to fly to Rutgers for a Wednesday night match.
Wondering what everyone’s thoughts/ideas/solutions are about the future of college football?
I really wish FBS college football could be set up with 3 "eastern" and 3 "western" (the dividing line would likely be a good bit east of the Mississippi because of population trends) 20 team conferences in tiers. Then use bowl games for the championship playoffs (top two teams from the top eastern conference vs top teams from the top western conference) and promotion/relegation games within the geographic tiers. It would make every bowl game meaningful, keeps teams honest during the regular season (each conference plays 10 games within the conference with one tune up game, homecoming and an end of the year rivalry game allowed outside of the conference). In the top conferences only the 10 conference game record determines eligibility for the playoffs, and makes the championship more likely to be the best 4 teams in the nation (because the top conferences played 10 games within the conference, and the weak teams in the conference can eventually be relegated, and there is a path allowing any team in the BCS system eventually reach the championship through purely on the field performance).
I'm not a fan of ESPN picking the schools that go into national superconferences based on the school's ratings.
I also support the promotion/relegation idea but it will definitely never happen. Regarding the playoff though, I think that ESPN does play an outsized role in deciding the future of the sport, particularly in regards to the conference realignment as of late. But I just don’t see evidence that they are influencing the playoff committee at all. Ohio State is probably the single biggest viewership draw and they have been left out more than once despite being one-loss conference champions. On the other hand Clemson is a smaller viewership draw compared to other giants of the sport and they have made it 6? times. There really haven’t been any controversial selections that would greatly increase viewership
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