by Bryce Swanson

Created on: December 18, 2009

 This is written in speech form, as I have given this presentation a few times in front of athletic departments.  Enjoy!

College Football Should Not Implement a Play-Off System

           How many of you travel to a place like Florida, Arizona, or Texas for a family vacation?  How many of you would like to travel to each of these places within a month to see your favorite sports team play?  Not very many of you would take a whole month and basically live out of a suitcase to follow your favorite sports team.   That’s exactly what would happen if college football moved to a playoff.  Fans would have to live out of a suitcase, for a month, not knowing when they would get to go home. 

 When doing research for this project, I consulted several sources.  When I did, a few names came up, one of which is Bill Hancock, he in charge of the BCS rankings and he knows quite a bit about sports, and playoffs.  He was in charge of the final four, he helped organize the Olympics when they were in Beijing, and he also helped with the Olympics in Athens.  

One of the solutions to the controversial rating system is to have a 4, 8, or even 16 team playoff.  There are several problems with implementing a playoff system. 

First a little history about the BCS, or Bowl Championship series. It started in 1998, as a new way of taking all the polls out there, the AP poll, the Coaches poll, and the Harris poll (media) and putting them together into one ranking system.   What the BCS does is it ranks Division 1-A football teams based on four different variables.  They are, the Subjective polls, which are voted on by the coaches, and media of all Division 1-A schools. A group of computers who rank the teams based on a statistical formula that is way too complex for any normal person to understand, let alone someone who is terrible at math like me to understand.  Also factored in is the strength of a team’s schedule, and the number of loses that a team has.  Based on these factors each team is rated from 1-119.  The number 1 and 2 teams play for the national title, in a head to head competition and the winner of that game calls themselves the National champion.  The other teams get a shot at one of the other 34 bowl games that are scheduled between December 19th and January 6th.  Each bowl game has a champion, but there is only

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