First thing's first:
Good discussions with different viewpoints are always a good thing!
Totally agree!
Okay now back to the discussion:
I disagree....How does the regular season become meaningless if teams have to win their division just to make a conference championship game?
I said "a lot of the regular season becomes meaningless . . . OOC games become literally meaningless except for the 2-3 teams seeking an at-large bid."
Like I said in my post, and I just wanna reiterate it because I really do think it's true, college football is so popular for one reason (beyond the obvious that the fanbase is tied directly to their team because of being alumni) and that reason is that every single game matters in the regular season.
This is true for teams at the very top all the way down to teams toward the bottom. If you're a title-contender like Alabama, every game matters because you can only lose once at most. If you're a title-contender from a poorer conference on any given year (Big 12 this year, for instance), every game really
really matters because you can't lose once if you want to make the playoff. Meanwhile on the other end of the spectrum, if you're a team like a Virginia or an NC State just trying to get bowl eligible, every game still matters. Obviously you're losing a decent amount of these games, but every game still matters because every win you can carve out is so precious toward that 7/6 game threshold. In this fashion, like 80% of the 128 D-1 schools have something to play for every single week of the regular season. They're all chasing something.
Now compare that to the NFL where basically every team is +/- 2 wins from an 8-8 record and, what, 12 of the 30 teams make the playoffs? It waters down the excitement because losses don't really hurt you that much unless you lose A LOT. College is much more intense week in and week out because you can't slip up once!
Now, considering they did go to an 8-team playoff, this would make OOC games completely meaningless. That surreal Ohio State home-and-home with your favorite school you've always dreamed of? Say your school's AD successfully arranges a home-and-home with tOSU...this is great!!! Except...no it isn't. It's lost its luster completely now because whoever wins or loses the game gains nothing from it except pride. You could be an ACC team and schedule an OOC of Alabama, USC, Texas, and Florida, and you could lose all four of those games, and still make the playoff, simply because you did well in your division and then stole one in the conference championship game. See the folly here in having auto-bids? I like the current system because there is no auto-bid. Being a conference champion certainly is a huge part of making the playoff in this 4-team system, but it isn't the
only metric. So far, all conference champions in this playoff format have been really good record-wise, i.e. 12-1, 13-0, something like that. But I promise you if a team has a rough season yet makes it to the CCG and wins and is sitting there as conference champion at 9-4, the committee won't put them in the playoff.
That is why I like the current setup of 4 teams. It rewards good OOC scheduling and it accounts for years where a conference is just way down and won't pick a team from that conference to be in the playoff.
If they do go to 8, one of two things will happen with OOC scheduling:
1. literally no one will schedule good OOCs anymore since they're meaningless and it will just be cupcake after cupcake with no end in sight.
2. Teams will schedule really, really stiff home-and-homes OOC since the threat of losing is no longer an issue, but........the luster is really taken off the appeal of these matchups because they're nothing more than glorified training scrimmages (unless you're seeking an at-large bid).
