CFN Analysis
Week 12 Thoughts, Nov. 21
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-
Cirminiello & Johnson: RGIII's
Heisman Day
- Mitchell: So what's going to
happen next?
- Harrison: Montee Ball & the
Heisman
- Zemek: College football
needs a flex system
- Sallee: Arkansas, welcome
back to the fun
By Matt Zemek
This college football season isn’t quite like the 2007 season, but it’s getting to that point.
The 2007 season offered a steady stream of upsets, a weekly parade of landscape-altering events from the middle of October through the night of December 1, when Pittsburgh won as a four-touchdown road underdog at West Virginia thanks to defensive coordinator Paul Rhoads. Before Saturday’s 2007-like orgy of upsets involving highly-ranked teams, the very same Mr. Rhoads was the main giant-killer of week 12 thanks to Iowa State’s eerie (Nevada-Boise State-like) upset of Oklahoma State. The other big similarity between 2007 and 2011 at this point is that one team has a clear edge on a large field. In 2007, Ohio State was the clear choice for the BCS National Championship Game, while a fat stack of two-loss teams sat in line for the second spot in New Orleans. In a fascinating inversion of scripts, the team which led the massive pack of (No. 2) chasers in 2007 has now become the clear No. 1 team with a full-lap lead on the field four years later: LSU.
The parallels between 2007 and 2011 represent the perfect time, then, to unearth this excerpt, which I wrote on November 5 of 2007. The details of the plan could and – probably – should be tweaked to fit emergent realities of conference realignment, but the larger principles remain. College football doesn’t need to have a playoff, but the one thing it certainly must do as it moves forward is to beef up the 12-game regular season and give it more heft, enough – at any rate – to create and reveal fully-tested teams with national schedules, teams worthy of being called “national champions.”
Here is that excerpt from November 5, 2007:
At a time in our sport's evolution when arguments (BCS or no BCS? Plus-one or playoff system? Four, eight, or 16 teams in a playoff?) are becoming calcified and stale, we need to inject some fresh thinking into the discussion. After spending the past few seasons without an original thought on this subject - due to the need to bash the BCS into the ground - I've emerged from something of a cave and can offer a new proposal that should satisfy college football's various warring factions.
Let's call this the "College Football Flex Plan."
If you follow pro football, you almost surely know that last year witnessed the beginning of the NFL's thoughtful and market-friendly decision to provide a "flex plan" in terms of Sunday Night game selection for NBC's season-long package. The concept is simple and smart: if a given matchup is a stinker, relegate it from Sunday night to Sunday afternoon, where FOX or CBS can pick up the game and assign it to the No. 5 broadcast crew. Since NBC pays big bucks for its primetime-only package, the Peacock is able to select a showcase game for late-season inclusion into its broadcast schedule. This kind of creative and nimble thinking illustrates why the NFL can be so incredibly profitable even while possessing a generally unwatchable product. (Side note: Have you ever stopped to consider why an early November regular-season game, Patriots-Colts, was so thoroughly hyped? Could it be because every other NFL team suffers so substantially by comparison?) College football - in terms of satisfying its fans while also adding more integrity to the (still-mythical) national championship selection process - should learn from the NFL and adopt its own kind of flex plan.
Instead of explaining the plan and then laying it out, let's just describe the plan and then explain it.
The "College Football Flex Plan" (CFFP) would involve the playing of 10 regular-season games from Labor Day weekend through the second weekend of November, with one bye included for every team. Conference games and established non-conference rivalries would comprise these ten contests. On the third weekend of November, everyone would get a week off. On the fourth weekend of November - usually Thanksgiving weekend - the teams in conferences that play a championship game (ACC, Big XII, SEC) could play their eleventh game. On the first weekend of December, the Big Ten, Big East, and Pac-10 could play their eleventh game, while the SEC, ACC and Big XII stage their title tilts.
Why the vague, cryptic and murky reference to the "eleventh game"? Glad you asked. The eleventh game forms the core of the CFFP, and it addresses the kinds of tensions that are emerging in the 2007 college football season (not to mention most seasons).
If you're a college football fan, you obviously want the two best teams to play for the national title. But in order to get to that point, you also want the deadwood to be cleared away first. You want the best teams in each conference to knock heads before the bowl selection show (or perhaps, in future years, a Final Four and/or plus one system). In other words, you would love for Kansas to play Oregon. You would love for Connecticut to play Oklahoma. The bowl games usually provide the sexy matchups, but in order to determine college football's best teams, you first need to identify - and, if at all possible, succeed in creating - the not-so-sexy matchups that emerge in a given season. The rise of previously unheralded schools such as Kansas, UConn, Virginia, Arizona State, Illinois, Kentucky, Boston College, Hawaii and Missouri (last year, the list included Rutgers, Wake Forest, Arkansas and BYU, but not as many upper-tier schools as is the case in 2007) demands that these teams play each other to separate the pretenders from the contenders. More specifically, these teams need to meet late in the season, when identities have been formed and early-season rust (think of Appalachian State over Michigan, South Florida over Auburn, and Washington over Boise State) is not an issue.
These kinds of games - a college football equivalent of college basketball's "Bracket Buster Saturday" - would occur in late November and early December under the CFFP. The mechanism used to decide the home team in these games could be arrived at in a number of different ways. Perhaps there would be an open drawing; perhaps certain conference matchups would be decided in advance; and perhaps TV would carry most of the weight in creating these matchups. At any rate, you'd have late-season matchups involving teams coming off bye weeks. You'd have non-conference games that would be part of the 11-game regular season, but they'd acquire a playoff-like feel. The arrangement would be friendly to television, but it would also be friendly to the fans of the participating schools because they wouldn't be staged at neutral locations.
All in all, the CFFP would settle a whole round of arguments at the end of the regular season, which would then make the conference title games and bowl games that much more interesting as well. Moreover, the CFFP - by providing relevant, freshly-arranged matchups at the end of the regular season - would almost certainly create a scenario in which remaining unbeatens would either fall or rise to the top. With this kind of a plan in place, the bowl system could be retained but still produce a more deserving national champion if a plus-one was inserted.
Let's summarize the "College Football Flex Plan" in a simple way: The CFFP shortens the regular season but adds playoff-style excitement; it provides compelling non-conference matchups, but within the regular season and, moreover, at the season's end; it's friendly to TV and fans; it enables teams to compete after a bye week, but not with a ridiculously long (51-day, Ohio State-style) layoff; it keeps the bowl system in place, but it also requires a plus one at the end. The CFFP provides something for everyone. It's worth looking at... even if the workings of the world suggest that sensible things just don't happen very often in life.
-
Cirminiello & Johnson: RGIII's
Heisman Day
- Mitchell: So what's going to
happen next?
- Harrison: Montee Ball & the
Heisman
- Zemek: College football
needs a flex system
- Sallee: Arkansas, welcome
back to the fun