Sports Talk: BCS Playoffs

It’s official, last month the conference commissioners met with the committee of university presidents and chancellors to approve the four-team seeded playoff beginning at the end of the 2014 season. This will consist of two semifinal games in bowls and a national championship game that will be put up for bid. Good move or not?!?!? I am a SUPER DUPER URBER HUGE fan of college football! I have no problem with the way the game is played and how the championship game is decided. With this change/system being put into place, the college football is looking at a serious facelift!

This is been something that the world has been debating on for years. Every sport known to man has some type of playoff system except college football.

So as of now you will have 4 teams, 1 title. The semifinals will be played New Year’s Eve or New Year’s Day. This will make for a Championship game played on Monday in January, six or more days after the final semifinal. What does this mean for the bowls? Well, the semifinals will rotate among six bowl sites; the championship game will be bid upon separately and will not be branded as a bowl game.

It will be up to the selection committee to rank the teams to play in the playoff. The contributing factors will be win-loss records, strength of schedules, head-to-head results and conference championships.

I am sure between now and the end of the 2014 season there is a lot of work to be done on this new system. Being a Buckeye and in the Big Ten family, talk has come about concerning the impact on the Rose Bowl (Big Ten/Pac-12). But from what I have been hearing the only guarantee is when the champions will meet comes when neither qualifies for the playoff and the Rose is not hosting a semifinal…meaning that both teams likely having multiple losses. But this means that these 2 conferences are still automatically locked into this bowl no matter what. Another possible issue is for example, if Ohio State wins the conference, they would be qualified to play in the Rose. Well is they are one of the teams in the four-team playoff, the Big Ten would just send a back-up team to be the Big Ten’s representative. So I guess Big Ten Nation and Pac-12 Nation will have to wait and see what happens!

But honestly, this is not the only situation like this. You have the ACC (Orange Bowl), Big 12 (Champions Bowl), and SEC (Champions Bowl). So the question is, is this really any different from the old system when it comes to automatic bids?