(04-30-2019 08:10 AM)Frank the Tank Wrote: I think it's perfectly intellectually consistent to want a 4-team playoff without any restrictions on creating the field and an 8-team playoff with auto-bids for the P5 and a slot for the G5. It's simple math: a 4-team playoff is too small to start putting in qualifiers, while the 8-team playoff is large enough to accommodate auto-bids along with a couple of at-large slots.
In an 8-team scenario, it boggles my mind how much college football fans get so ornery about the thought of an "unworthy" conference or division champ getting into the playoff. That happens in every other sport quite frequently (*especially* in the NCAA Tournament), but everyone understands it because that is an objective on-the-field determination where everyone knows the rules and it's not based on the eye test or some other subjective criteria based on the whims of some old dudes sitting in a conference room in Dallas. You can have auto-bids in an 8-team playoff without bringing in any subjectivity for those slots while still having at-large bids for those schools that might have been the 2nd best team in the country but just happened to be stuck in a division with the best team in the country. That can all be quite easily accommodated and every other major sport in America has already shown that it can be done.
Two points about the bolded parts:
1) I disagree about the frequency with which perceived "unworthy" division champs make the playoffs in other sports. I think it's extremely rare, and the reason for that is because of how the champs are determined: Crucially, in the NFL, or NBA, or NHL, or MLB, the division champ is the team with the best OVERALL record, not division record. E.g., if the Giants go 8-0 in the NFC East and the Redskins go 6-2, but the Giants overall record is 10-6 while the Skins are 12-4, the Skins win the division, and everyone agrees they deserved to.
But in college football, only conference records count. So it's possible for e.g., Iowa to finish 10-2, with a H2H win over Penn State, while Penn State goes 9-4, but because of how the divisions shake out, Penn State wins the B1G. That is an awful look.
2) Now yes, in college hoops, sometimes a team that had a bad regular season, and say finished 6th in the ACC, goes on a run and wins the ACC tournament, thus claiming an automatic spot. But, that isn't a problem either, because the NCAA tournament is so large that all the ACC teams that had better seasons than them will make the tournament anyway as at-larges.
Not so in an 8-team playoff. In that Iowa/PSU scenario, with 6 of 8 spots guaranteed to champs and just two at-large, it is very likely that the Unworthy champ is the only team from the conference that makes the playoffs.
IMO, that's a big problem: The college system of choosing its conference champs is too flawed, and there are too few at-large spots, to give guaranteed spots to conference champs in an 8 team playoff.
Those who talk about how "all the other major sports" manage to give their division/conference champs a guaranteed spot in playoffs overlook the fact that there are key differences in how those sports choose their division champs which give them far more legitimacy than college conference champs for claiming a guaranteed slot.