happens in other sports as well. often the 2 best teams in the NFL are from the same conference, thereby making the conference championship the real Super Bowl. hell, it seemed that was true nearly every year in the 90's.
If one of them beats the other and goes undefeated, why does the loser deserve a 2nd chance while some other team that has gone undefeated doesn't? The beauty of this is that the two teams DO get to play each other, and the winner moves on. I can't tell if you're a fan of playoffs to decide things, or polls given that you've already decided who the best two teams are? Would a playoff be better? Absolutely. But absent that, no team should get a 2nd chance when there are other teams that haven't had any chance. Ohio State vs. Miami should have taught us that just because a team LOOKS like it will crush its opponent doesn't mean it will.
In the middle of overtime, the teams realize that everyone wins when they work together. So they form one big school called "Gulf U" and crush every other team. After the season, the NCAA removes Gulf U from the league because of their dominance, and the Gulf U TIDEGERS become an NFL team, where they dominate for the next century.
Actually what would be best IMO would be a round-robin in which who's hot at the end doesn't matter any more than who's hot in the beginning There's something illogical about playoffs - most obvous in baseball, where the system is: playing 162 baseball games, and then wiping them out in favor of a small tournament among a few teams at the end of the season of 11-19 games, especially since baseball is the one sport where random chance appears to be a huge element. Baseball seasons going to 150-162 games was a huge sample size for good teams to distance themselves from the weak; yet among the strong teams the sample size is compressed to about a 1/10th of that. Huh? Iit's a little counterintuitive that the promotional idea of having a world series between two league champions has now morphed into our definition of what a champion is today. I actually like the european/south american football system of round-robin + promotion/relegation the best, and am wondering if you could do that in college football. (I think you actually could, you'd design a number of 4-or 5 team divisions and have rounds of promotion & relegation over 15 games. Unfortunately, people seem wedded to the "Big game" concept of world series/superbowl/finals playoffs etc instead. It's a good way to do things in some respects but creates "unfair" situations like you identified above.
Depends. Say bama wins on a last second field goal. Was the homefield advantage the deciding factor in the game? Maybe. A close Bama win is the only way to put them both in the big game. If LSU wins or if Bama blows them out it won't happen.
I completely agree with this, and you know how much I love baseball. I'd be fine with getting rid of the wild cards entirely to have this make sense again...to make chasing a division crown meaningful the way it was before. When a pennant race actually meant a pennant race. I'd lose on that, though. Hell, Selig won't stop until we enter an NBA-style system where more teams make the playoffs than don't make the playoffs. Ugh.
It's one of the great curses of the success of March Madness - everybody sees that cash cow and thinks you need cinderallas to make money. Back slightly on topic, you could design a very cool system in college football of 5-team divisions with promotion and relegation over multiple phases of a season, but of course anything that money and the tradition (of making money) has a stake in, makes it impossible to be realized.
Certainly - there's no "fair" way to determine a "best" team because there's no ideal definition of "best". For example, in the round-robin strategy, health plays a factor in a different way. If your best player is injured the first half of the season but then gets healthy, you'd be a "better" team than your record if you took people's best teams against each other. On the flipside, if your best player is hurt during the playoffs, you're a different team as well. These things also affect football and baseball differently, in that things even out more in baseball over the course of a season, whereas one game in football changes things more dramatically. But sports is ultimately about entertainment, and that means giving fans the most opportunity to be excited about their teams. In a round robin structure, teams that can't end in 1st place will lose interest completely much more quickly. With playoffs - and wild cards - you involve the fans of a lot more teams to later in the season. Plus, playoffs are good for ratings and hype, which are critical to the success of any sports league.
I actually like the proposed 2 wildcard idea in baseball, with a single game play-in between the two wildcards. It lets fans of more teams stay involved, but also gives a HUGE reward to division winners by not having to play that play-in game. And it doesn't penalize you for being in a division with the Yankees.
If there's a rematch, it would be at the Superdome, so it would essentially be a home game for LSU. It would be entertaininng if Alabama wins the first by a FG, and LSU wins the 2nd by a FG. To get back on topic, my prediction is a convincing win for one team or the other - 14+ pts. No idea who, but I don't think this game lives up to the hype.
Of course - there's always going to be luck involved like injuries etc - I just hate the way we mix the two types of arrangements. In soccer, again, there's usually a cup tournament and a domestic league, and the champion of one is the one who wins each on its own terms - Here, we mix the two and call them the champion of a whole season, more or less, when they're really more of a cup champion. NHL IIRC used to realize this, nominally, by awarding a trophy to the highest points-scoring team as in scocer.
Gameday is already here and set up. Tickets are going for 4 figures. Anyone else going to the game? On a side note, Lebron James, Lil Wayne, Chris Bosh and Dwyane Wade will be here this weekend.
