The Essence of the "Playoff" problem...

[OregonOrange]

I believe it begins with pre-season rankings. Certain teams always seemed to get ranked high pre-season based on how they did last year and who's returning. As we see year after year, some teams have a prediliction for failing to deliver, i.e. Notre Dame and some conferences fail to deliver in post-season play.

With a playoff system, you are distilling the best team by non-conference, head-to-head play. Make that on a truly neutral site, in varying weather, and you introduce enough variables, imo, to produce the better team to advance. Injuries and drama, not withstanding.

So find a way to not rank until mid-season, transparently, and the playoff becomes much more interesting to everyone. Unless of course your ego won't allow it. Someone a few years back posted an analysis of past BCS scenarios and determined it would take a 12 or 16 team playoff to be fair.

 

[javadoc]

I believe it begins with pre-season rankings. Certain teams always seemed to get ranked high pre-season based on how they did last year and who's returning.

It depends on which ratings system you are talking about. Most of the computer polls lose their correlation to the initial rankings by about the 5th game, if I recall.

You'll never eliminate the human element in the ratings. People will make their predictions and write them on napkins if there is no formalized way to report them through a media poll, and the same prejudices will persist.

 

[texascpa]

I have always been an advocate of a 16-team playoff.

 

[baggerbob]

No human polls need to eliminate the bias of regional human voters.

 

[orangetrojan]

I've always thought 8 would have been sufficient when there was 6 power conferences - leaving room for the 6 conference winners and 2 at-large bids and a possible minimum floor for the conference winners, say being at least top 12 in the final BCS standings. Now with 5 power conferences, it leaves 3 spots for at-large, which is even better.

Even still 4 is not bad but egos are getting in the way, it should just be the top 4 teams as ranked with the current BCS formula, end of story, no conference automatics. But of course football heads could turn folding a napkin into a 3 hour process.

 

[kirbivore]

ditch the coaches poll, keep the Harris poll, but don't rank teams until the first Monday in October.

 

[Faegan]

Take the 4 top teams, then conference champs that fall w/in a specified ranking range, and then at large for any leftover spots. Good compromise.