Taylor Zarzour was saying this morning that he'd like to see the highest ranked P5 team that didn't make its championship game play the highest ranked G5 team. This would give the G5 team an opportunity to play somebody and prove itself. It would also prevent a team from sitting on the couch on championship weekend, while other teams put it on the line, and then back door its way in. This year, it would solve the problem of ND not playing a championship game and it would have given UCF an opportunity to move up.
At first I loved the idea, and it's not terrible. What I don't like about it is that it it gives a team that didn't win its division a second shot at life that it probably doesn't deserve. Let's say Michigan gets to play UCF this year (instead of ND). That's probably a more compelling game than OSU/NW and gives Michigan an opportunity to jump Ohio State that we don't really deserve unless they lose. But, again, it's still probably an overall improvement.
But then I got thinking...why do we have all these teams playing in a conference championship that don't really have any chance at the playoff and can only play spoiler anyway? Why should Pitt and NW get a crack at ruining Clemson and OSU's chance...wouldn't you rather see ND (#3) or Michigan (#7)? And that's when it all came into focus. We need to destroy these conference championship games. I know lots of people have been on this for a while...I don't meant to be late to the party and then act like it was my idea.
You ditch these conference championship games and what do you give up? You give up control of the game to the conference and some money. But you're replacing it with another game, a more compelling one at that in most cases! Surely, you can figure out the economics. The other thing you give up is a "true" champion. But who really cares? We lived with co-champs for a hundred years and it was fine. What you get back is that you ditch the divisions, which is a great thing. You avoid the unfair deal where a NW loses all its non conference games, then plays a weak schedule in a weak division and gets to earn an auto-bid by taking down the East champ in one game (if you kept the conferences the way they are and granted auto-bids to champions). You also get your conference back. You don't have this deal where you don't play a team in the other division for 5 or 6 years, or whatever it is. You can protect 2 rivalries and then rotate the other 11 teams through your remaining 7 games.
So....instead of NW playing OSU and Pitt playing Clemson this week for conference championship, Clemson is the outright ACC champion. OSU and Michigan are Big Ten co-champions. You'd replace the conference championship games with:
Alabama/UCF
Georgia/Oklahoma
Notre Dame/OSU
Clemson/Michigan
Or, more likely, the committee would jimmy the matchups to avoid rematches until the final. So you'd probably actually get:
1 Alabama/8 UCF
4 Notre Dame/5 OSU
3 Georgia/6 Oklahoma
2 Clemson/7 Michigan
No auto-bids for conference champions because you're going to have a bunch of co-champs. You can say that you need to be at least a co-champion if you want, but probably not because that would bump out 1-loss Georgia over a bunch of 1-loss co-champs for no reason other than they had the misfortune to be in Alabama's conference, and they didn't play each other.
At first I loved the idea, and it's not terrible. What I don't like about it is that it it gives a team that didn't win its division a second shot at life that it probably doesn't deserve. Let's say Michigan gets to play UCF this year (instead of ND). That's probably a more compelling game than OSU/NW and gives Michigan an opportunity to jump Ohio State that we don't really deserve unless they lose. But, again, it's still probably an overall improvement.
But then I got thinking...why do we have all these teams playing in a conference championship that don't really have any chance at the playoff and can only play spoiler anyway? Why should Pitt and NW get a crack at ruining Clemson and OSU's chance...wouldn't you rather see ND (#3) or Michigan (#7)? And that's when it all came into focus. We need to destroy these conference championship games. I know lots of people have been on this for a while...I don't meant to be late to the party and then act like it was my idea.
You ditch these conference championship games and what do you give up? You give up control of the game to the conference and some money. But you're replacing it with another game, a more compelling one at that in most cases! Surely, you can figure out the economics. The other thing you give up is a "true" champion. But who really cares? We lived with co-champs for a hundred years and it was fine. What you get back is that you ditch the divisions, which is a great thing. You avoid the unfair deal where a NW loses all its non conference games, then plays a weak schedule in a weak division and gets to earn an auto-bid by taking down the East champ in one game (if you kept the conferences the way they are and granted auto-bids to champions). You also get your conference back. You don't have this deal where you don't play a team in the other division for 5 or 6 years, or whatever it is. You can protect 2 rivalries and then rotate the other 11 teams through your remaining 7 games.
So....instead of NW playing OSU and Pitt playing Clemson this week for conference championship, Clemson is the outright ACC champion. OSU and Michigan are Big Ten co-champions. You'd replace the conference championship games with:
Alabama/UCF
Georgia/Oklahoma
Notre Dame/OSU
Clemson/Michigan
Or, more likely, the committee would jimmy the matchups to avoid rematches until the final. So you'd probably actually get:
1 Alabama/8 UCF
4 Notre Dame/5 OSU
3 Georgia/6 Oklahoma
2 Clemson/7 Michigan
No auto-bids for conference champions because you're going to have a bunch of co-champs. You can say that you need to be at least a co-champion if you want, but probably not because that would bump out 1-loss Georgia over a bunch of 1-loss co-champs for no reason other than they had the misfortune to be in Alabama's conference, and they didn't play each other.
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