Does anybody feel like college football has a national champion? Of course not. That was a rhetorical question. Now that the season is all over, it's time for the "Oklahoma lost to Texas, Texas barely beat Penn State and USC crushed them, so USC would beat Florida" arguments begin. We'll stay out of it.You also won't hear the Grind joining the cacophony of those calling for a playoff, including the President-elect and Congress. We aren't among those who want all the rich guys on bowl committees strung up by their multicolored blazers. No, it's not because we love the bloated BCS, but because a playoff system will ruin college football's regular season.
Of all the big spectator sports in the country; MLB, NBA, NHL, NCAA hoops, NHL and even NASCAR, only college football has a regular season where every single week counts -- where even one bad performance is enough to dash a team's title hopes. Add a playoff and all that changes.
The question is how we define "best"? Do we want to reward the team that plays well all season, or one that gets hot at the end of the year? In the NFL, as the Giants showed last season, a middle-of-the road team can squeak into the playoffs, suddenly click and win it all. In college football that can't happen, so the regular season is much more important. Right now any loss for a contender, like Penn State falling at Iowa this year, is a bone-crushing disaster. With a playoffs, teams could lose even a few games and still be in the championship hunt.
Here, an inescapable dynamic of competition would come into play: When losing isn't a very big deal, winning becomes a lot less fun. Making NCAA football's regular season less important, changing something that makes the sport unique, would inevitably suck a lot of the drama out of those glorious afternoons in the fall.
In non-college football news, Chris Carter said something mean about Terrell Owens on TV, and TO blogged a response. Wake us when recess is over.Sports by Brooks has the story on fútbol mega-star Cristiano Ronaldo totaling his Ferrari in the always embarrassing single-car wreck. Thank goodness. Without insanely overpaid athletes buying cars they can't drive, exotic makes like Ferrari would have to close up shop.
Corky Simspon, a grown man with a child's name, admitted he made a mistake by not voting Rickey Henderson into the Hall of Fame. The 70-year-old Simpson, who writes a weekly column for the Green Valley (Ariz.) News & Sun, relegated Henderson to a list of also-rans. ESPN.com's Rob Neyer wrote about it and started an uproar in sports blogdom.
Fellow Green Valley News sportswriter Nick Prevenas said several hundred people posted comments under Simpson's column at the newspaper's website
"Usually, we're lucky if we get one comment on a story," Prevenas said.
