TUPAVIEW: College football playoffs' time to exit has arrived

BY MIKE TUPA

BARTLESVILLE AREA SPORTS REPORT

Prepare for my annual anti-college-football-playoff one-man crusade.

I’m no prophet of zoom — my mug is best suited for pen-only persuasion.

No new arguments, no new brilliant insights, unless you ask my mom and sister.

But they’ve gone to that great luxury box in the clouds so I find my fan base on this globe has suffered a major reduction.

Still I forge forward having long ago piddled away my pride and learned to embrace humiliation. I don’t know, maybe it was my perspicuous prediction in print that Ryan Leaf would prevail over Peyton Manning as a better NFL quarterback.

Perhaps it was my campaign for a massive write-in surge to lobby for Joe Kapp to be enshrined in Canton or my prognostication Spud Webb would win the slam dunk contest. (Oops, that one really happened, the one flaw on my otherwise imperfect record.)

It seems I’m to sports analysis what Santa Claus is to spandex.

Even so I persist.

I don’t like, have never liked or will never like a college football playoff system.

Period.

Don’t get me into the “what about the NCAA basketball tournament?” discussion. Perhaps it applies, perhaps not. That’s a conversation for another day.

This is strictly about football.

I believe the individual bowl system is the greatest college postseason system ever devised. Forget about “who is the true No. 1?”

Who cares? 

The essence of college football — its meaning, tradition and significance — is greater by triple than any playoff process. The bottom line is this: If it ain’t your school — or your short list of favorites — in the CFP, who gives a King Tut burp?

Is there any wonder the whole thing is staged on ESPN rather than one of the main networks? When’s the last time you saw the Super Bowl, World Series or NBA Finals show up on anything but a callsign with three letters in it?

The only way to create a legitimate playoff system is to organize college football into major league-like divisions. We’ve got around 135 eligible teams so that avenue would require probably 16 or 17 eight-man divisions. Once the college football landscape has been completely convulsed and several traditional annual matchups dropped in the toilet — then we’ve got to figure out a playoff format. Does it include just division winners? Are there any wildcards? Who?

You know and I know there would be griping ascending to the porch of St. Peter about how the third-place team in Division M is twice as good as the champion of Division G.

So what are you settling? College football is all about partisan wrangling and favorable angling.  People will be grumbling from now until their funerals about how their school wuz robbed by not being selected for the CFP. So-called college football experts will dissect the selection process until all that’s left is a crumb not even big enough for a mouse.

Don’t you get it? The push for college football playoffs is not about the fans. It was and is a media-manufactured event, a much-ado-about-nothing-that-really-matters endeavor whose greatest by-products are manipulation of supporters by forcing them to shell out for additional games, additional job security for the media industry and unrelenting avarice by the big money folks that have hi-jacked college football.

So what is — or was — so great about the bowls.

First, it provided an opportunity for 20 or 30 sets of seniors to finish their career as winners. That’s in contrast to now, where the losers in the CFP will always be haunted by guilt complexes about how they failed — even though the expectations and pressure were totally unfair.

Second, I liked the idea of a consensus way — through polls — of picking a national champion. That wouldn’t work in the pros, which are small enough to have a workable playoff system, but I thought it suited college football best. By having 25 hand-picked veteran sportswriters or coaches take into account all the factors and follow a consistent protocol was a superior system to the selection process for playoff teams, whether it be by power rankings or in the hands of a few. 

Hopefully people realize the real power in a subjectively-chosen football system to “prove it on the field,” is the power to pick who gets to prove it on the field and who stays home. Again, unless we want to turn college football into a massive pro-like division-based monolith, no playoff system will be fair. First they want four teams. Then eight teams. Then 12 teams. Then … well, you get the idea.

At least with a poll-based championship all the great teams are given equal consideration and all the intelligent considerations factored in.

Third, kids go to college to study. Even though the media creates the impression that most kids are pros in embryo, the truth is the overwhelming number of players are not going to play for pay. They’re going to rely on their education to make a living. By extending the college football season and populating it with more games takes away from studies. It can’t help but do that. It’s a no-brainer. The sport should cater to the well-being of the players more than the coffers of the greedy money people or TV coverage.

Fourth, I miss wall-to-wall football on New Year’s Day in the biggest bowl games — especially the Rose Bowl, the Orange Bowl and the Cotton Bowl. I miss being able to switch channels if one game got out of hand and seeing another one. I miss the significance of those big bowl games — or all bowl games. To be a Rose Bowl champion or Cotton Bowl winner, or whichever, was considered a big deal. Each bowl boasted its own pageantry and heritage. Each bowl was a championship in itself. Each bowl celebrated the greatness of college football. Currently, these bowls are just stinkin’ satellites with no real tradition, no actual meaning. No one cares whether you call it the Rose Bowl or the Coffee Bean Bowl.

Fifth, in conjunction with the point above, I long for the return of the traditional bowl matchups — the Big Ten champ vs. the PAC-12 champ in the Rose Bowl, the Big Eight/12 champ in the Orange Bowl, the WAC champ in the Fiesta Bowl, the SWC or Big 12 represented in the Cotton Bowl, and so on. I also liked the bowls because they were geared to treating players from both teams like heroes and in providing a cultural experience.

Well, if you made it this far, thank you. I’ll spare you my opinion of the black hole portal or the NIL-fueled destruction of the spirit of college sports.

Oops! Just can’t keep those opinions within P.C. boundaries.