Merit: (noun) "the quality of being particularly good or worthy, especially so as to deserve praise or reward."
Neither is "we used to award multiple national championships based on the results of different polls so we shouldn't have a playoff."
Yes. The rules stipulate the top 4 seeds would be the top 4 conference champions. You can argue whether or not that's a reasonable rule, but ASU merited inclusion and that ranking based on the rules.
Because sports need parity. If the same teams win all the time people grow tired. Hence the push for the playoff in the first place and expansion. The SEC and Big were the conferences that pushed for the automatic qualifiers. It’s still merit based even if you don’t want to admit it. Arizona state won their conference. That is merit. With the conference being assumed to be so far apart (that’s not always true and blown out of proportion) I think it’s vital to have atleast every conference winner. Florida state can’t force the rest of the acc to get better. So why should the rest of the teams in that conference be punished.
You saw it before I changed to. That was a stupid argument I will admit. Re read my post.
This is hands down better than the bcs and anyone who says other wise is dumbfounding.
The system was ludicrous to start with.
The CFP has always been the ESPN/Disney College Football Post Season Invitational Tournament. Any competition where the participants are selected by a committee or poll can't really be considered a true championship. Until the playoff is played by nothing but conference champions in a single elimination format, the national championship will continue to be mythical.
The NCAA has never had a national champion in D1 (FBS) football. They have champions in every other collegiate sport but not the top level of football.
I realize that, which is why I indicated the polls chose the champions. The NCAA does recognize a list of consensus champions based on certain polls. See page 125 of this PDF from the NCAA.
I'm not saying everybody agreed on who the best team was. But that's what the title meant, and it was based on a season-long body of work. The winner of an expanded playoff is just that: The playoff winner. Some years, it may actually be the best team (or at least somebody who had a reasonable argument), but sooner or later, it will be a 3-loss (or more) team who winds up there through a series of upsets by them or their opponents. Like the 2011 Giants, while that team will be crowned "champion," nobody will delude themselves into thinking they were best team.
And the 4 team playoff relegated every team not in contention (which for more than half of college football was in week one) to irrelevance. It solved a problem by creating a bigger problem, which the expanded playoff rectifies.
FWIW, I advocated for a "Bowl Plus One" system, but nobody at ESPN listened to me.
As in, play the bowls, then choose the best two after that to play the championship?
How much merit though? 5-6 SEC teams would go undefeated in ACC action. Maybe more.
That would be a glorified bcs and a total crap show on who the best teams are. It needs to be a playoff format.
Sure. Most years there weren't more than 2 teams with a legitimate claim after all the bowls are played. You're never going to end all controversy, but that system would have preserved the traditional bowl tie-ins and given every candidate one additional datapoint by playing a quality opponent. It would have also maintained the intense importance on the regular season.
Texas A&M was certainly a quality win along with Clemson and Mizzou. I dont like clemson as much as anyone here but most people would consider that a quality win regardless. If you look at A&M, yeah they fell off the rankings at the end, but they really only had one bad loss and that was two weeks ago against Auburn. Otherwise, they really had a pretty good season. Yes they were a quality win for us and their losses to ND, Texas and us puts us in pretty good company.... Auburn aside.
And this is an example of a rule which may be adjusted in future years.
