2024-2025 NCAA Football Season Thread Football • Page 129

I’m really curious how it goes if Sampson doesn’t pull up injured on the first drive since so much of our offense revolves around making defenses cover him specifically, but that’s for hypotheticals. It’s like there was no Plan B or C. That’s what always set Saban apart, if A wasn’t working, immediately went into a different game plan.

 

Yeah. This year has really opened up my eyes to how great Saban and his staff were at stopping the bleeding and adjusting in-game. There was always a plan B that would work and get us back in the game. Feels like his recruiting prowess and business-like way of operating overshadowed his actual elite on the field coaching.

 

people just want something to complain about. if it were a 2 team format, one of the two teams this year doesn't seem to know who their best QB is. if it were four teams, we just saw one of the four teams get dog walked by a team that wouldn't have made it under a 4 team format and is clearly the better team. a 6 team format would be the worst version possible. the fact of the matter is this is the best option. OSU pretty clearly is a top 3 team in the country and could run away with the whole thing but under any of the other scenarios they'd be out? fuck outta here. people complaining about blowouts as if that hasn’t been the case with every other year of the playoff smh. 12 or 16 teams is the best way.

 

Hell yeah!!!!

 

Even though the first round was a bunch of duds, it at least eliminated the “what if” that a BCS and 4-team playoff left open.

Of course there is a million hypotheticals people could call out but nothing is perfect. Look at all the Super Bowls that have been blowouts, Finals, World Series or Stanley Cup Finals that are sweeps or over in 5 games. There will never be a perfect scenario.

 

I think the difference is the CFP first round were all blowouts and each game went chalk - yes there were blowouts in the NFL wild card round but you got a couple of upsets (or at least road teams winning) along with a great LA-DET game

 

I really think this already solved itself for a 4 team playoff moving forward with the consolidation down to 3 major conferences, the Big 12 now straddling that line, and Notre Dame, and will even more so with a likely ACC implosion to come soonish

looking at last year’s playoff, it fixes itself with Michigan/Washington and Georgia/Texas presumably playing each other in conference championships, making it pretty easy to get undefeated FSU in, and just creating a little bit of swirl around which team that lost their play-in opportunity gets in too

it’s *fine* to have the Boise States and Indianas getting a shot at it and I like their inclusions more than a hypothetically better 3 loss team, but at that point, your “what if”s become things like “what if Ohio St didn’t lose to Michigan/Indiana didn’t lose to Ohio St” or “what if Boise pulled off the upset” as opposed to like real actual snubs/eliminations by no fault of your own

 

this has been the case in every iteration of the playoff

 

I'm so bored by people being upset by the blowouts

It's the only conversation happening in college football and it's tired and boring as fuck

 

mostly by people who don’t watch or care until the playoffs lol

 

Days of discourse over a team who got blown out by Oklahoma

Oklahoma used to be the auto-win in the playoffs, just win the game and get over yourselves

Prove the SEC is hard by actually being a hard team to beat

 

I think the discussion is fairly useless. We’re entering a new era of CFB. The power conferences will assuredly move into their own level of CFB to sell off the tv rights within a decade I think and the whole landscape will be completely different. Not to mention NIL’s are still in early days and the big basketball schools should also be utilizing that to better their football programs now (Indiana, Kentucky, Syracuse, etc).

Arguing about a playoff format’s first year in a sport under going massive radical changes is just so pointless to me.

 

My only critique of the format, despite initially being a fan of it, is that if too many home field first round games go to chalk, and the weather keeps sucking because it's December and that's just what it is, I do think we see those games move to bowls as well (the NCAA probably gets higher revenue from a bowl game) sooner rather than later. Unless you're a fan of the team doing the blowing out, everyone else wants competitive football and neutral site games would inspire that a bit more.

But I'm not rushing to say that has to be the format next year. Let's see a couple seasons. If we don't get a single upset in the first round in a few years, let's circle back.

 

I agree about the home field advantage

It's a funny thing to have for round 1 and no other rounds

 

upsets don’t really matter to me so much in the first round as a team like OSU who might be in the 6-7 spot who is clearly one of the top 4 teams passed over by at large and conference winner bids who could win it all. i could see that happening quite easily every season and its fun. there’s a very small number of teams who look as good this season as OSU does when they play well.

 

I would love to see some sort of coefficient system like what is used to determine the champions league bids and use that for the number of playoff bids per conference.

 

Clearly the solution is to have a Tuscaloosa seed for Alabama to auto-qualify just to make sure all concerns are addressed

 

Logistically this probably isn’t possible but the “home” team for the first round games could maybe be moved to a nearby dome stadium to eliminate the issue of the cold - although outdoor weather games are the absolute best so I personally would hate moving everything inside.

but logistically probably not easy to attain and still have the “home” team feel like it’s a home game. Like, most of the schools in Indiana could play at the Colts stadium, Michigan teams could play in Detroit, etc. Badgers and Illinois would be a bit screwed since there’s no close domes - would likely default to Indianapolis (lol since that’s where they would just be for the Big Ten title game, how exciting for them).

I also assume schools wouldn’t want to lose the home playoff game since they make more money there (less travel costs, make money on food and drinks, etc.)

 

It's tough because let's imagine hypothetically a team like Texas or Oklahoma or LSU or something wins the SEC but Alabama and Georgia all have good seasons and Miami has a good season and so on and so forth. At a certain point you kinda run out of football capable stadiums in a radius if too many teams are doing great haha.

I'm fine with teams in round 1 not getting any kind of home field advantage. Keep the spirit of the bowl games by having em neutral and if they can't win without the advantage they definitely can't win in the next round so whatever

 

I realize that likely means we'd have lost our game and that's okay

 

I forgot I made that post and got really scared for why I had 11 notifications.

 

@CobraKidJon

 

Aaron Judge the best bulldong

 

that is an unfortunate mental image