DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk K-9 Consensus Does the Mountain West Conference deserve an Automatic Bowl Bid?

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Whoever wins the Mountain West automatically goes to a BCS bowl game.

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I was explaining to Michelle what the collecter was talking about.

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You know what ?? I apologize, because I thought later that might be what you were getting at,...I am a dork. You meant they "should" get an automatic,...? That wasn't what you typed though,....

But they shouldn't. Their schedules are worse than the big conferences "out-of'-conference" games.

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Well Tech and Boise didn't deserve to go, neither took care of business in their bowl games.

I think we ever have a playoff, you can't shut out the conference winner. But for the system now, I'd like the top 8 teams to go, that would give us a lot better matchups every game.

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If we ever see a playoff... Which I hope doesn't happen (I want the and one game)... But, if we ever do have a playoff, the format will be...

6 BCS conference winners + 2 at large teams.

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What a basketball conferance though

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This year, the field would have included:
Florida, Oklahoma, USC, Penn State, #12 Cincinnati, #19 VaTech, Utah, and Texas.

I won't even get into how these teams might be seeded (for instance, would VaTech be afforded a #6 seed despite their ranking. If so, would Texas be the #8 seed and face Florida first because of their wild card status despite being the #3 overall BCS team?).

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What a basketball conferance though

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Hailing the #1 ranked team!!! hail to pitt!

I saw some one say how they would be seeded in an 8 team playoff. I'd hope they'd go by bcs rankings so cincy and va tech would have had to face florida and oklahoma. That would be the fairest way, they should do that in the nfl, you win you division you're in, but that doesn't guarantee a home game.

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I'm all over that one,...! I think being allowed to play AT ALL is "reward" enough. Some years you just end up in a Division at 12-4 (Indy) when the champion goes 14-2,...on the other hand, then, maybe you'll fight a little harder for that Division Crown next time,...?

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No to mention you'd have to have a Notre Dame clause.

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Good point, I forgot about that. I don't like it either, but you are absolutely correct that it would happen.

So, with the recent ascension of mid-major teams...if ND fields a good team again, then you would be left with:

6 BCS conference champs + mid-major + ND

That means if an 8-4 Missouri team shocks an 11-1 Oklahoma team (or something similar in the SEC or ACC), then you can have more low ranked teams in the playoffs while higher ranked teams watch at home.

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I compromised earlier with DC in this thread, 6 with 2 first round byes, would be awesome, just totally awesome.

This year, Fla, Okie, USC, Texas, Utah and Alabama. WOW !!

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That sounds good to me.. Florida and Oklahoma get the byes because of their ranking, and according to the BCS, Texas plays Utah (at Texas), the winner plays Florida (at Florida), Alabama plays USC (at Alabama), the winner plays Oklahoma (at Oklahoma).... then the winners meet on a predetermined neutral field... LOVE IT!!!

And if you want to talk about who can complain about this.. Boise State can complain (nobody will listen, but they can complain.. ), Penn State could complain because, keep in mind, all of this happens BEFORE they get blown out by USC so that would not have been known and Texas Tech could complain for the same reason, all of this happens BEFORE they get blown out Ole Miss...

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So, IF you had a 6 team, 2 bye system, before the season started, and all willing parties agree thereto, there wouldn't be a beef,...

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There would be less of a beef.. but didn't they all agree on the BCS? That doesn't stop them from complaining and lobbying for their teams.. Yes, it's harder to say, "Hey, we're the #8 team in the country, we deserve to play for the national championship." than it is to say, "Hey, we're the #3 team in the country, we deserve to play for the national championship."

Heck, basketball invites 65 teams and some still complain if they get excluded...

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but the point is that they won't all agree on a BCS that excludes some conference champions from making any sort of playoff.

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Each year, when fans, broadcasters and columnists engage in their annual hand-wringing over the lack of a college football playoff, the lords of the BCS defend their divisive system by noting a playoff would deflate the sport's uniquely gripping regular season. Playoff proponents never want to hear it.

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present the living embodiment of a devalued regular season: The Arizona Cardinals.

In a little over a week, the Cardinals, who finished the NFL regular season with a 9-7 record, will face the 12-4 Pittsburgh Steelers for the right to be crowned 2008 NFL champions. That seems like a misnomer, though, as Arizona will have earned its championship primarily in 2009.

Never mind that the Cardinals scored one more point (427) than their opponents (426) over the course of a 16-game season. Never mind that they lost four of their last six games, including three by at least 21 points. Never mind that 15 other teams -- nearly half the league -- finished with the same or a better record than Arizona.

Because the sport employs a traditional playoff rather than polls and computers, a Cardinals championship will be deemed far more legitimate than Florida's BCS title this past college season. Four great playoff games will override four months of mediocrity.

Much the same thing occurred last year when the New England Patriots beat the New York Giants in the regular-season finale to become the first team in history to finish 16-0. In the end, though, all that mattered was the Giants -- a 10-6 wild-card team -- beating the Patriots in a February rematch.

Peter King addressed this subject in his most recent Monday Morning Quarterback, asking "What exactly does the [NFL] regular season mean anymore?"

"If the NFL has now arrived at a strange point where regular-season performance does nothing to predict playoff performance, and every team has an equal chance to win if they make the tournament, is that bad for the league?'' Football Outsiders president Aaron Schatz wrote King in an e-mail.

It's certainly bad for the Tennessee Titans, whose league-best 13-3 record this season earned them ... bupkis.

On Tuesday, a reader asked King whether the two best teams were playing in the Super Bowl, to which King replied: "The two hottest teams at the end of the year are in the [Super Bowl], which is all that counts."

If that's true, why does the NFL even bother to hold a regular season? (Wait, I know -- for fantasy football and gamblers.) Why not stage one big, 32-team playoff? Heck, the league could hold three of those in the same amount of time it takes to bother with a regular season.

Three Super Bowls a year. Imagine the ad revenue!

In a story from last week's Sports Illustrated leading up to the NFC title game, Cardinals defensive end Bertrand Berry explained his team's late-season slump thusly: "Mentally we eased up a little bit because we had clinched [the NFC West division] so early."

That, my friends, is exactly what college football's powers-that-be fear most. Theirs is the only sport where every single game truly matters, where you can't afford to take your foot off the peddle for even one week. (Just ask USC.) Were there a playoff, the Gators -- which, like the Cardinals, clinched their division early (Nov. 8) -- could have tanked their last three regular-season games without jeopardizing their title hopes in the slightest.


The Virginia Tech Hokies are a more appropriate college parallel to the Cardinals. The Hokies won the ACC last season with a 9-4 record. They were ranked 19th in the final BCS standings and hadn't entered the national-title discussion since the preseason.

However, in a playoff, Virginia Tech would have been guaranteed a berth. (Every other major sport, college and professional, gives first dibs to conference/division champions. College football wouldn't be any different.) Who's to say the Hokies couldn't have gotten hot, pulled off a couple of upsets and won the whole thing?

A national champion with four losses. There goes your "meaningful" regular season.

Don't get me wrong, the BCS is far from ideal. Now more than ever, it's an inherently ludicrous task to identify just two teams worthy of a shot at the national championship.

Much of the angst directed toward the BCS is not about the format as much as the selection process, which puts teams' fates in the hands of sportswriters, coaches and computers. While no postseason format will ever be controversy-free, the proposed "plus-one" -- a four-team playoff using the bowls as semifinals -- would widen the pool of contenders without devaluing the regular season.

However, at the BCS meetings in Hollywood, Fla., last spring, several conference commissioners expressed their reservation that a plus-one would be the first step down an inevitable path toward an eight- or, eventually, 16-team playoff. And that's when the college regular season as we know it goes kaput.

Most playoff proponents refuse to believe that. Of course the regular season would still matter, they say. Alabama fans will always care about the Auburn game, Florida State fans the Florida game, regardless of record.

That may be true at first. But as with every other single-elimination sport, sooner or later, the playoffs would become the only thing that matters. As it is today, fans of all but the most woeful teams retain a vested interest until the very end due to the prospect of a bowl berth. With a playoff in place, fans would inevitably lose interest once their teams were eliminated from contention. Even if the bowls stayed in business, they'd become to football what the NIT is to basketball.

Meanwhile, the regular season would become just like the NFL's and college basketball's. Instead of revolving around the national-title race, the biggest games at the end of the season would be those involving potential wild-card or at-large teams. In college football, there's always at least one, if not several, big "national" games each week (like the ones GameDay features). With a playoff, it would be more like basketball, where there are only two truly "big" games unaffiliated fans watch in droves: The two Duke-North Carolina games. Just substitute Ohio State-Michigan and Oklahoma-Texas.

Obviously, the NFL doesn't exactly suffer because of its playoff format. Fans will not be any less interested in next September's games due to the Cardinals' presence in this year's Super Bowl. But the ebb and flow of professional football's season has been entrenched for 40-plus years. It's engrained in us that the regular season is merely a build-up to the playoffs.

For 100-plus years, it's been engrained in college football fans that every week matters, and that teams are judged on their season-long performance. The prospect of a 9-7 team (or 9-4 team, as the case may be) playing for the national championship flies in the face of the sport's entire tradition.

The single most common argument college playoff advocates make is that: "Every other sport does it." What they never bother to consider is that perhaps there's a reason college football is different than those other sports.

If the Cardinals played in college, they might have finished their season in the hometown Insight Bowl. Last month, two 7-5 teams -- Minnesota and Kansas -- played in that relatively low-profile game.

It's funny. In college, we complain when mediocre teams like the Gophers and Jayhawks are rewarded with bowl berths. In the pros, the system rewards comparable teams with a shot at the championship. [\quote]