College Football Fallacy

As you probably know I am a a big proponent of a College Football Playoff System. You can Go Here to read more about that, but what I would like to touch on here is what I believe to be a common fallacy among proponents of the status quo, which is a single National Title BCS playoff game. What I believe to be the fallacy, which gets thrown around in the mainstream media (MSM) all the time, is that under the current BCS format the regular season games mean more than it would under an 8 team playoff (picking 8 for arguments sake).

Listening to this argument coming from the MSM got me to ponder if this was really the case. Yes, under the current system the regular season games mean more... but not for many teams. The problem is that too many teams are eliminated from serious championship contention early in the season. If a solid Division-1 team loses a game during the season, it takes a hope and a prayer and devine intervention from a computer program to get a shot at the National Title game. I remember one year, a one loss USC team had its National Title hopes resting on a meaningless WAC game at the end of the year, because their strength of schedule would look better or worse to the computer program depending on who won the game.

Under the current BCS system, as the season progresses more and more teams (often very good ones) drop out of title contention, only to have the rest of their season become meaningless as far as title hopes go. By the last two or three weeks, you only have a half a dozen teams playing meaningful games with the top two or three teams only controlling their own destiny. On the surface, there appear to be quite a few meaningless regular season games. In fact, nearly all the games are meaningless towards the last couple of weeks of the season.

Under an eight team playoff system, you would have college teams fighting for 8 spots, not 2 during the regular season. Many of these 8 spots would be up for grabs deep into a season, thus making more of the regular season games meaningful. No longer would you have a TCU or Boise State team winning every single game during the regular season and have nothing to show for it. I mean, how meaningful can the regular season be, when a good team like TCU or Boise State goes undefeated during the regular season and doesn't get a shot to play for the National Title.

The current system is unfair and it does not render the regular season more meaningful, in fact it renders it less meaningful. Below are my estimates as to how many teams left in contention for the National Title (realistically not mathematically) there are each week under both a 2 and 8 team playoff system.

Week #	BCS 2-Team	8 Team
1	200	200
2	115	140
3	70	110
4	45	90
5	30	75
6	20	62
7	15	50
8	12	40
9	10	35
10	8	30
11	7	25
12	6	20
13	5	17
14	4	15