While sitting in a restaurant, hoping
the food would arrive before the new year (it was a day or so after Christmas
Day), your loyal blogger noticed the I-Don’t-Care-Who-Wins Bowl presented by
Nobody-Else-Does-Either on the television high above the bar on the other side
of the eatery.
After watching a few plays (which
seemed to indicate the people in the city where the game was played didn’t care
too much either because none of them bought tickets), this blogger began to
make predictions about the future of college football.
The results:
The I-Don’t-Care-Who-Wins Bowl, which
is played in a cold weather town named Can’t-Find-Us-On-A-Map, may not survive
too many more years. Why watch a pair of 6-6 teams play poorly in the snow?
The four-team playoff coming to the
NCAA’s most important division will create more complaints than the BCS
computer ranking system ever did.
Notre Dame will be included in the
playoff system any year the Fighting Irish can achieve seven wins. They will
not deserve it, just like they should not have been matched against Alabama a
year ago, but money talks and Notre Dame is good for television rankings.
The four-school playoff system will
last one year. It will expand to eight and eventually to 16 schools. Even with
that number of invitees, some conferences will not be represented, not even by
the conference champions. A 10-win conference championship team from the
Mountain West might not get a spot in the Magic 16, but the fourth-place team
from the weakest division in the Big 10 will get a bid.
Some college football teams will play
17 games in a season soon.
No school from the Mountain West will
ever host a playoff game under the new format.
Eventually, the Big 10 (which has a
dozen members) will return to its traditional position as one of the toughest
conferences in the country for football. Right now, the Big 10 is a paper
tiger.
Next season, a guy who lived across
the street from Nick Saban when Saban was an assistant coach two decades ago at
(pick a school) will have lunch with another guy who once attended a game at a
school which recently fired its football coach. Based on that luncheon, the
national media will run wild with the ‘news’ that Saban is shopping himself
around.
The Southeastern Conference will
probably have only one representative, if it gets that many, in the football
final four next year. It says here that any team which wins its division in the
SEC is probably deserving of a berth in the Final Four, whether it wins the
conference championship game or not.
The SEC championship game will no
longer be a semi-final game for the national championship system. It will be a
quarter-final game. Because humans, not computers, will make all the
determinations in the future, the SEC will return to an under-valued position
among the elite conferences.
The next toughest conference in the
country will be proven to be the Pacific 12. At least they can count their
members, which is more than the Big 10 or Big 12 can say.
The final play of the Iron Bowl, the
109-yard return of the missed field goal by an Auburn player against Alabama,
will be replayed 45 times or more during the national championship game’s
pre-game show.
Yours truly will not slip on a patch of ice and suffer an injury during the final
hour before the national championship game this season. I will walk the dog
earlier this time.
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