Lockup;1050277; said:
Let's all not forget why we do not have a Playoff system already.
Not because of what it would do to the regular season.
Not because of the tradition of the bowls.
Not because of what it would do to the kids and their school work
but
Because money, money, money.
no, no, no
The reason we don't have a playoff already is because of fear, fear, fear.
[strike]The people in charge of the decision[/strike]The people who are currently exercising their veto power over the move to a play-off right now are the University Presidents. These are men and women who never left academia.
There are too many reasons to go into it here, and I probably don't need to because the following statement is not controversial among people who have experience in the real world: THE REAL WORLD IS A VERY DIFFERENT PLACE FROM ACADEMIA.
People stay in academia all of their lives for various reasons. The majority stay there because they prefer it to the real world for one reason or another. Those who have been there long enough to become University Presidents have the culture of it ingrained into their soul, into their decision making process.
These men and women are not, by their nature, capitalists or entrepreneurs. They are egg-heads. After spending a few decades in the nest, they have nothing like the stomach necessary to scrap an old system where the money and the people are known commodities.
In order to get a play-off system, that's what they'd have to do: Leave a known system behind, with its well-heeled supporters who are all very complimentary of and connected to academia; and enter a new system with new supporters with unknown piles of money, many of whom will be private-sector types (I can hear the egg-heads cringe as I type).
Would there be less money in a play-off system? Don't make me laugh. Take one look at the acres of empty seating at lower-tier bowls and come back and make that point with a straight face. There were huge swaths of the New Mexico Bowl that were devoid of people, and New Mexico was playing in that game! Even if some of the lower-tier bowls were included in a play-off and some were not, it is difficult to imagine that those left behind would become less relevant than they are.
Or maybe people are just thinking of how irrelevant they would seem compared to the bowls that were made part of the play-off system, or to the play-off system itself if it were made separate. This is a tacit admission that the 8 games involving 16 play-off teams, or the 4 games involving 8 teams; would be far more interesting than what we have now.
Why do you think it is that even some BCS bowls were not sold out? Does anyone want to try to suggest that these games wouldn't be sold out if they were play off games? Feel free to believe it, but please don't expect me to refrain from laughing at you if you say it out loud.
Then of course there is the old, "People wouldn't be able to travel to multiple rounds of a play-off".
Bull-crap
Somehow, the NFL pulls it off and their fans survive.
These are the kinds of issues that private sector types, the entrepreneurs and capitalists that the egg-heads so fear, are very good at solving.
But those people will never get their hands on the problem until the egg-heads let them. Don't hold your breath.
