This is the first in a series discussing college football’s quirks and oddities, what makes it great, where it comes up short, and how it can be improved (realistically). The first part takes a look at the obvious, college football’s oft-disappointing postseason.

College Football is unique to any other American team sport in several ways. One of them is the oft-cited conundrum that college football has the best regular season of any sport, while also having the worst postseason of any sport. While the degree to which that is the case varies depending on individual perspective, I think most sports fans would acknowledge that there is some truth in that. At the very least, college football may be the only sport whose regular season is universally acknowledged as being more compelling than its postseason. This is largely due to a confluence of factors that impact how the sport currently operates. They are:

  1. While college football generates massive revenues, the games are played by students who are not paid.
  2. The various institutions that make the revenues have fought tooth-and-nail to preserve the amateur/student-athlete model; and they will continue to do so even as that construct is gradually chipped away in the courts.
  3. Despite not paying their players wages, many of the institutions’ athletics departments are highly leveraged financially thanks to skyrocketing costs; including coaches’ salaries, facilities, funding scholarships, recruiting and other operational expenses, and funding all non-revenue sports.
  4. There is no central leadership in college football that makes and implements decisions that are in the best interest of the sport as a whole. Instead there are numerous conferences, each of whose leadership acts in the best interests of their own members, and occasionally in conflict with the best interests of other conferences.
  5. Football is a hazardous and extreme contact sport that frequently results in both  short and long term health consequences. Therefore, all parties involved have a degree of interest in limiting the players’ exposure.
  6. There are currently 130 teams that play at the highest level of college football (FBS). Each team typically may have up to 85 players on scholarship in a season, 11,050 total. The degree of separation in size, speed and skill from the top tier to the bottom tier of those 11,050 players is very stark.
  7. While nearly all major college football players have hopes of eventually playing professionally, the coveted recruits in the top tier tend to congregate at a very small number of elite football schools, where they believe they will be best prepared for an NFL career.

No other sport operates under all of those conditions, and each of them combine to heavily influence the game that college football is today. This unique set of circumstances is part of what makes the regular season so great. When just 4 of 130 eligible teams make it to the playoff, some regular season games naturally become de facto playoff games.

Also, those 130 teams only play 12 regular season games each, most of them coming against opponents that are annually set in stone, with others predetermined years in advance. This inflexibility typically leaves us with insufficient data points to measure every team’s worthiness, since we can’t ensure the best matchups for the best teams on an annual basis. This has occasionally led to spirited debate over the selection of the four most worthy teams for the playoff. While this is a source of frustration for many (namely fans of teams that fall just outside the top four in a given season), the subjective nature of the selection process also adds to the intrigue of the regular season.

During this series, I plan to examine several questions surrounding the college football postseason. They are:

  1. How did we get here?
  2. Can we improve the postseason? If so, how?
  3. Should we? (i.e., could there be unintended consequences that only make things worse?)

They are questions with no obvious or easy answers, especially when you factor my 7 points above. All of the viewpoints expressed here are strictly my own. While I have an opinion on the matter I will strive to present all sides fairly, as there are many that are worthy of mention and consideration.

How We Got Here

I’ll try not to dive too deep in the weeds with history here, but to know where you’re going it helps first to understand where you’ve been.

While the first college football games were played in 1869, it wasn’t until the early 1900’s that the idea of crowning a champion was conceived. The first effort had a familiar ring to it; the method of determining a champion was not by having the top teams compete on the field at the end of the season to settle the matter. Rather, they were crowned by a sportswriter; Caspar Whitney of Outing magazine (he was also the one who initiated the All-American team in 1889 when he was with Harper’s). Whitney used a mathematical system he devised to rate teams from 1905-07, but grew tired of the exercise and that was it.

It would not be until 1926 that determining a champion would again take hold. Several interested individuals, from statisticians to sportswriters to economics professors, ranked not only current champions, but also attempted to retroactively rank teams all the way back to that inaugural 1869 season.

The various mathematical systems remained around for some time, but it was in 1936 that the game changed. That was the year the Associated Press released its first poll, which relied on a consensus among sportswriters. In the decades that followed numerous other organizations released their own polls, often resulting in split titles, but it was the AP that carried the most weight with the public, and their champion was widely recognized as “official.”

So what did the NCAA do about all this, you may be wondering? Same as always, which is not very much. The NCAA officially lists national champions going all the way back to 1869, recognizing numerous different systems and polls throughout the years, and many times recognizing multiple winners in a given season. For instance, in 1919 the NCAA lists Harvard, Illinois, Notre Dame and Texas A&M as football champions, based on six different rankings systems that existed at the time. So if you think things are convoluted now….

Curiously, when the AP began its polling of teams it would release its final poll at the very end of the regular season, thus crowning its champion before bowl games were played. As you can imagine, there were instances of the AP’s champion losing their bowl game and a different team having a very legitimate claim to the title. It wasn’t until 1968 that the AP began releasing its final poll after all bowl games were played.

This still did not eliminate controversy, as there was no mechanism that assured a bowl game would feature the top two teams. As they do today, many bowls had some sort of conference tie-in that locked in at least one team. However, in those days there were more at-large spots for bowl worthy teams, plus more independent teams who were free to accept a bid to any game that invited them, so the potential for championship-determining matchups wasn’t completely up to chance. Still, from 1936 – 1991, the #1 and #2 AP teams met in a bowl game just 8 times. So occasionally it worked. Mostly, it didn’t.

This is how it was in college football until the final decade of the 20th century. The next chapter will focus on how disparate forces in college football came together to try and find a fix, how it works today, and what we can hope to see in the future vs what we’re likely to see in the future.

Some of the historical information I cited came directly from this article on Saturdayblitz.com.

Mike Lowe
Mike Lowe

College Football Analyst

Mike is a Baltimore native living in Portland, OR since 2007. He currently runs his own business specializing in video production and online marketing. Prior to that he was a legal technology consultant, worked for 9 years at Johns Hopkins University and served 6 years in the Air Force. He also enjoys travel, food, beer, and is a volunteer at the Oregon Humane Society.

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