(07-12-2021 11:23 AM)Wedge Wrote:  

(07-11-2021 08:53 PM)ken d Wrote:  

(07-11-2021 07:07 PM)Wedge Wrote:  

(07-11-2021 06:13 PM)quo vadis Wrote:  But make it based on that, and then you might have fans dropping out when they realize their 3-3 team isn't going anywhere, like they do in the NFL.

That's not what happens at all.

Last season's Tampa Bay Buccaneers were 7-5 after 12 games and won the Super Bowl.

The 2011 NY Giants were 6-6 after 12 games and won the Super Bowl.

The whole point of the NFL format, like it or not, is that your 3-3 team could easily make the playoffs and might even win it all if they get hot. There are many things to dislike about the NFL, IMO, but they do a great job of selling hope to as many fan bases as possible.

They also have the benefit of the draft, salary caps and free agency to keep the gap between the best and worst teams as small as possible. The only way to come close to that in college football is to have much smaller leagues, each with schools with similar resources compared with their competitors. You can't do it with 130 teams in the same division (FBS). Even the entire P5 as a separate division would be too many schools.

College basketball has the same gaps in resources. Yet college basketball has more parity, and more hope for fans of different teams, than college football even with more than 300 teams in Division I. The last 10 NCAA men's basketball tournaments have had 8 different champions and 29 different Final Four teams. And if you extend it out to the Elite 8 and then the Sweet 16 you would have substantially more teams involved over that period of time.

College basketball has a 68-team playoff. And typically, about 40 or so of those teams are from the FBS. So that's 40 out of 130 FBS schools that get in, compared to 12 in the proposed playoff, a much smaller field.

Plus, if you are the P5 conferences, why on earth would you want "more parity"? Parity just means that you lose relative status.

That's the thing some miss when they say "well, the whole pie gets larger so they will be making more than now". Relative money and status is more important than absolute values. E.g., if in my community I have $5million and nobody else has more than $1 million, I'm the Big Kahuna. If someone proposed a new social scheme that would boost my neighbors to $4 million but me to $8 million too, I'd reject that scheme, because even though I'm richer than before, I've lost a lot of relative status and power. Which is really what life is about.

P5 have no interest in seeing those below gain relative power and status, nor should they. Why on earth should Ohio State care if UC - Santa Barbara fans have more hope than they used to? No reason at all, and they'd be dumb to allow their status/power gap to erode for more dollars.

The whole reason the power teams split away from the NCAA TV deal in 1984 was to get away from the parity model of hoops. They have zero reason to return to it.