Jay P. Greene's Blog

Barack Obama has his finger on the pulse of American public opinion.  So when the president-elect came out in support of an 8 team college football playoff to replace the current BCS-selected match-up of the top two teams, he was endorsing a view held by 97.4% of all football fans.  This stat comes from the same source that found that 73.8% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

I, however, am among the 2.6% that prefers the current BCS method.  Why? — because an 8 team playoff solves virtually none of the supposed injustices of a BCS-selected championship game and because playoffs create significant, new problems.

The main injustice that a playoff is supposed to prevent is the exclusion of worthy teams from competing in the post-season for the national championship.  The current system uses a formula combining coach and journalist rankings of teams with computer models of team performance given the difficulty of their schedules to identify the top two teams in the country.  Those two teams then play for the national championship. 

“But what about the third ranked team?” opponents of this system ask.  Shouldn’t they have a chance to compete for the championship also?  This concern for injustice is compounded by disputes over whether the top two teams identified by the BCS really are the two best teams.  People become particularly passionate about this if their team is the one ranked 3rd (or even 4th, 5th, etc…).  And the fact that computer models have a hand in selecting the top two teams only fuels the technophobe football fan rage.  The intensity of opposition to BCS ratings is almost always inversely related to a person’s ability to do algebra (or even compute simple sums).

Moving to an 8 team playoff doesn’t really solve this perceived injustice.  Instead of arguing over whether the 3rd ranked team was unjustly excluded from competing in the post-season for the national championship, we’ll just argue about whether the 9th ranked team was unjustly excluded.  You have to draw the line somewhere.

In addition, there has to be some method for selecting the 8 teams.  If you don’t like relying on computer models and polls, try to describe a system that would more accurately identify the best teams.  Some have suggested providing guaranteed spots to the winners of 6 of the most competitive conferences with two additional teams selected at-large.  But it’s not hard to imagine the injustices that would flow from such a system.  Who gets to pick the 6 conferences?  Why shouldn’t the 7th conference have a guaranteed spot?  What if there are two top-notch teams in a conference?  How will we select the two at-large teams?  The bar arguments will never end no matter how we select teams.

The virtue of the BCS method of ranking is that it combines multiple reasonable methods into a single rating.  It incorporates the subjective judgment of experts as well as the dispassionate computer assessment of team schedules.  Sure, the BCS, like any rating system, will be imperfect.  But its methodology is reasonable and the rules are clearly stated in advance.

The only question remaining is why only have 2 teams in the post-season instead of 4 or 8 (or 16 for that matter).  I’ve already argued that drawing the line anywhere is somewhat arbitrary and would produce disputes and claims of injustice.  But others might respond that it is better to have more teams included in the post-season than fewer. 

The problem with expanding the post-season to include more teams in the national championship race is that it would require more games to be played.  You cannot add games to college football without a price.  Other than among advocates of the ginormous financial bailout, everyone understands that there is no such thing as a free lunch.  Extra college games come at a cost.

If we simply add two more games to the post-season to have an 8 team playoff, we are requiring players to have longer seasons with greater opportunities for injuries.  Remember that college football players are uncompensated young students (and free tuition hardly qualifies as fair compensation given how much revenue they generate).  If we make them play longer seasons, they run a significantly higher risk of suffering debilitating injuries that could ruin any hopes for a professional football career and/or turn them into life-long cripples.  Barack Obama and 97.4% of all football fans may not care about exploiting unpaid college kids for our entertainment, but I think there have to be limits.

I suppose we could instead shorten the regular season by two games to avoid making players extend their season.  But if we do that we will reduce the information from the regular season for determining who deserves to be in the playoffs.  We’ll also deprive the vast majority of college football programs and their fans of two games and the revenue those games produce.  Again, there is no free lunch.

People wonder why college football is the only major sport without a playoff.  But college football is different from other sports.  Football is so brutal that it can only be played once a week and even then the probability of serious injury increases dramatically with each additional game.  We can expect the pros to play longer and run those risks because, well, their pros.  They are paid (although not nearly enough — but that is a story for another day), while college athletes are virtually unpaid (and that is an injustice that should also be corrected — but that is also a story for another day).  I’d rather have a bunch of bar arguments over whether the 3rd ranked team was unjustly excluded from the championship game than significantly increase the exploitation of college football players.