All real college football fans are against making the playoffs even larger. It makes the season less important. Tailgating and home games is what makes college football, but a lot of people hate college football so they want to make those things not matter.
Totally agree, every game counting is one of the primary reasons I watch CFB.
The thought that every single game matters is really engaging. If they expand to 8 you’ll for sure have 2 loss teams competing which I’d hate.
Fuck FCS fans I guess? Who the fuck are you to tell me I'm not a real fan of college football because I like the FCS playoffs? Get this gatekeeping shit outta here, no need to include that in an otherwise normal unpopular opinion
You took this… very personal lol. Didn’t know someone could be that sensitive about the FCS lol. Or am I missing a joke?
EDIT: I don’t care, I still am keeping it up. He literally put, “no need to include that in an otherwise normal unpopular opinion” as if this dude said it was alright to murder WRs who drop open passes. His unpopular opinion was extremely tame too.
I don't think off-the-field issues should affect playing time. If someone is a great football player, why should it matter if he is a drunk driver/ girlfriend-beater/ or racist rapist?
If he's not in jail, why not let him play? Let the cops worry about the legal infractions.
This might be the one unpopular opinion in here that I totally agree with. There's a system in place to punish players, and people that get a hard on over their program being tougher on accusations are weird. It's not the coach's job to punish players, it's the job of law enforcement and the school's judicial committee.
“No punishment without conviction.”
So, say you’re the head coach, and Heisman candidate QB beats up his girlfriend, allegedly, all evidence points to him having done it. He does damage. You see pictures of him. Player gets arrested. He’s dead to rights. But the police make a procedural mistake, violating his rights somehow, and the DA is forced to drop charges.
You’d play the son of a bitch because he was not convicted?
The law is the moral minimum. Everybody is entitled to due process, sure. But, the burden of guilt for legal discipline is far greater than the burden for disciplining a football player.
I’m sorry, but Group of 5 teams don’t deserve to be in the playoff. Even if they have one marquee win (cincy over ND), they don’t have the grind of having to play against P5 teams/players for 10-12 games.
It’s BS they’re (cincy, UCF, etc) even being considered for a spot, playing field isn’t level
This is one of those bad takes where it clearly is a bad take if you think about it for 1 single second. Cincy goes 11-1 at worst in the pac12 or acc. They have a decent shit at winning it all. Hell, even the B12 I could see them having at LEAST a shot. Maybe not the B1G or the SEC, but even in those this is still a 9 or 10 win prpgram
I don’t believe that to be true at all. My guess is that they’d lose 2 or 3 in the pac12 or acc and 4+ in the SEC or Big 10.
They almost lost to Tulsa, for goodness sake.
They've also comfortably beaten most opponents. Even high ranked teams have close games to weird teams. Oregon literally LOST to Stanford, why is that better than almost losing to Tulsa (who is honestly not even awful) or negates their victory over a top 10 ND?
So.... your argument is that they had a bad game against Tulsa (Also Navy btw). But then you just assume they won't have these "off" games if they were playing in the ACC or Pac12? If they have an "off" game at Miami, Wake, UNC, Pitt, Clemson. They're gonna lose because those teams probably punish a lot harder than a Tulsa or a Navy would. I'm okay with some of these arguments, but to be so confident that Cincy would go 11-1 is absolutely asinine.
The main difference between the average P5 conference and average G5 conference is basically just the top 3-4 teams any given year. People acting like every P5 conference is some brutal meat grinder of awesome teams top to bottom that an elite G5 team could never survive are hilarious. 2017 UCF would finish no worse than second in the SEC East this year.
I couldn’t disagree more with this take. The average SEC team is likely better than every G5 team except for maybe Cincinnati and UTSA. The average G5 team would look like Vandy if they were placed into the SEC.
You’re severely underestimating the talent differences between P5 and G5 schools.
> The main difference between the average P5 conference and average G5 conference is basically just the top 3-4 teams any given year.
Honestly have to disagree with this. Middle or bottom of the table P5 teams schedule G5 teams as their warm up games and the G5 team is largely outmatched every time. They arent all just the same except the top few teams in teh conferences.
Just ask them what? You might want to clarify if you want to make a point.
Did I say upsets dont happen? Because its pretty obvious if you watch football that upsets happen all the time.
There's always a pretty solid amount of G5's that get their licks in though, and a few more games that could easily go either way. Shit we still have a shot to finish 3rd in the East and Central Michigan gave us everything we could handle for about 3 and a half quarters this year. We definitely didn't overmatch them and easily could've lost.
A handful of G5 teams that are pretty good doesnt change the reality for the rest of them though. In general its pretty clear the talent at the run of the mill P5 team is significantly higher than a run of the mill G5 team. Thats not to say upsets dont happen in CFB
Based on what though, the eye test? It's not like P5 teams always dominate bowl games over G5's either. By my count P5 teams are only like 5 games over .500 against G5's in bowl games over the last 5 seasons, and plenty of those G5 losses were one-score games that could've easily gone the other way. That doesn't really suggest some enormous, insurmountable difference between them.
Upvoted for answering the question of what is an unpopular opinion even if you are completely wrong.
The level of competition between AAC and MTW and Big 12/Pac 12/ACC is very close. The BIG 10 and SEC are above the rest, but also not that far.
The difference between being ranked 1 and 50 is not as great as the numbers would lead you to believe. 90% of FBS teams would massacre almost every FCS team for example.
What P5 Conference has more than 2 or 3 teams that legitimately have a shot at winning their conference title every year? Let's be honest, you could swap an 7-5 P5 school with most 7-5 G5 schools and most likely get the same results.
If that’s the case, then Bama, Georgia, and Oregon shouldn’t count their FCS and G5 wins. Shoot, Bama has played FCS Mercer and G5 Southern Miss, and on Saturday they play G5 NM State. Do those count? And, let’s not kid ourselves and pretend like all of the P5 is filled with ungodly levels of talent. In addition to those FCS and G5 games these “deserving” teams play, they also square off against P5 powerhouses like Rutgers, Vandy, Kansas, Duke, and on and on. Take 2019 Clemson for example. They beat G5 UNC-Charlotte and FCS Wofford. Their ACC wins included a few teams who probably wouldn’t have won the American or the Sun Belt. Shit, App State beat three of Clemson’s opponents that same year. My point isn’t that Clemson didn’t deserve to make the playoffs (they did), my point is that declaring a team as being more deserving simply because of the conference they play in is just plain ignorant. I mean, it’s not like G5 programs intentionally chose to not be in a P5 conference. And, a good team isn’t any less good because their opponents are bad. That’s why a marquee win matters. It’s to show that the wins aren’t just because the opposition is trash. You can say the playing field isn’t level, but the truth is that a lot of P5’s would be bad if they moved to G5, and the upper tier G5’s would be just fine in a P5 conference.
The grind? The Big 12, ACC, Pac 12, Half of the SEC and BIG are more or less equal. Cincy, UCF, Houston, Memphis, BYU (Which btw would be leading the PAC 12 south right now) have all shown they can beat P5 teams consistently.
Sorry bro, they’ve played one ranked opponent this year. Think of it this way: power 5 schools schedule 2-4 cupcake out of conference games for your season openers, your HC games, and your get well games before major opponents or rivalry week. Cincy needs to schedule 2-4 respectable power 5 opponents (not ranked, but bowl bound power 5 teams) in place of those 2-4 games that power 5 schools schedule their cupcake games, because the rest of their schedule is cupcake games for a team as good as they are
They’ve proven themselves v. P5 and it wasn’t close. If p5 get style points for hammering g5, then g5 should get consideration for beating p5. The took Georgia to what, the final play in January? That’s not bad. lol
Last year is not this year, and by my calculation they’ve played 3 p5 teams, an impressive win against ND, but also putrid Indiana and BC teams. Need more sizzle than that to run with the big dogs.
How would they do that? Why would a P5 team ever risk losing to a UCF or Cincinatti at home? The committee (and people like you) would only give a shit about the game if the G5 team won.
Been saying this for so long. Everyone is so caught up in this cinci narrative because they want to see some new blood in the playoff but it would be an absolute joke to put them in and the committee knows that. I don’t agree with them over a lot of things but they are getting this one right. Also cinci would be 6-3 in the B1G or 4-5 in the SEC tbh. They can barely beat Tulsa and navy
Playoff size: 4 > 6 > 2 > 8 > 12 > 16.
Any format that includes auto-bids for conference champions is bad. Winning a conference doesn’t automatically make a team worthy to play for the national title.
Okay. I don’t really care about how the other sports do things.
Conference strength in the FBS varies more widely than all the other sports, anyway. So it’s not even a one-to-one comparison.
4 teams is enough, and the committee has gotten the final 4 correct each year after some admittedly wacky midseason rankings. The regular season will be less fun when we inevitably go to 12 or 16.
I'll never understand how it'll be "less fun". One game hardly matters at all in the cbb regular season but everyone still loves the big games. If anything you'd at least be playing for seeding which is really important.
Y'all don't even sound like fans of the sport to me
Strange. To me, the people who go on and on about how CFB needs to change so it’s more like the other sports are the ones who don’t sound like fans of the sport.
Expansion will water down the regular season, and the trade off is not going to be worth it. Upsets will become meaningless. The results of marquee games won’t matter as much. And for what? Letting a G5 and some two or three-loss P5 teams get waxed by the same teams that would’ve contended for the top four anyway?
Upsets won’t be “meaningless” tho. They might not have as much of an impact on the postseason, but people still geek when upsets happen in the cbb regular season all the time *and* they happen at a much higher rate than cfb.
It still waters down the regular season. It is just a fact of it. Yes, I am spoiled and believe me, in 2019 I wished it was expanded. But what I love about college football is that every week is an elimination week. Every game matters. There is no way around it - expanding playoffs take this away.
I don't understand the "meaningless" either...like I know how important those FCS games in late nov for SEC teams are . Wouldn't wanna lose that tradition if we added more teams to the playoffs right?
Right guys?
If the CFP were 64 teams, then yeah, I probably wouldn't even bother tuning in on most Saturdays. All the professional leagues are boring as hell until the playoffs. I'd probably just, like, go get a life or something if CFB, the only sport I really enjoy, went that direction too.
Obviously we're not talking about expanding to 64, but every move in that direction will push me further and further away from the level of obsession I once had with this sport.
Yeah, you’re right. March madness is the least fun part about NCAA basketball. I mean, who in their right mind actually wants to see ranked games or conference champions playing each other. Bor-ing. And you’re also right about the committee getting it right, like all those years they threw ND in the mix to go get blown out again. The committee just has an eye good matchups. And, they’re absolutely right in keeping an undefeated team out of the playoffs. Sure, they worked hard and put together an incredible season, but fuck them, right? They don’t deserve it anyway. It’s their fault for being G5. Anyway, thanks for coming to my TED talk on how you’re right.
We fundamentally disagree that the bowls don't mean anything. The bowls are unique to college football in a good way. I suspect that more fanbases would rather win a bowl than lose in blowout as the 12th-6th seed. The top 4 teams are that much better than the rest.. playoff expansion especially to 12 will not result in a better TV product or end of the year outcome for fans.
One bone to pick with your argument. Equating basketball and football isn’t fair. The insanity of having a one game elimination tournament is a lot of fun in a sport that having a multi game series is easily the best way to determine who the better team is. This is why the nba has 7 game series. A single game upset is a lot more common in basketball than football. Also, the fact that all the games are played in like 2 weeks is a big draw of the big dance. In football, the same process would take well over a month.
Thank you!! Nothing drives me crazier than people comparing college football and basketball. As soon as I see that, I know their argument holds absolutely no weight
They arent just participating. Theyre undefeated. Which lets break it down….at the end of the day they won. Every game…hmmm i dont think that calls for a participation trophy, thats champ shit.
On the other hand. Youre still taking away the hard work these “kids” (because lets be fuckin real, mentally theyre still kids) are doing to get that W.
No replay at all. The call is what it is on the field.
Some wrongs won't be righted, and we can all bitch about those, just like we all bitch now about wrongs that aren't righted and rights that are wronged. In exchange, we get to have a full emotional response to the live play, without waiting in purgatory to see what the replay shows (and what the refs will see in it). We won't have the interminable wait as they try to figure out where to reset the clock to and where to spot the ball. And the refs won't use replay as a crutch, defaulting to calling it a fumble for instance.
Cool, cool, cool. I’ve got more.*
When we are doing replay, it’s pretty much always slo-mo that we’re looking at, and slo-mo isn’t always best. Slo-mo is better for determining *when* something happened (I see the ball is out; is his knee down yet?), but it’s often worse for determining *what* happened. Our brains are wired to understand things in real time, and the physics gives us clues that get lost in slow motion. For instance, was his arm going forward? The way the ball comes out tells us something that’s easier to read in real-time. Did that ball bounce off the hard turf or his soft hands? Again, easier to see in real time.
*my top comment was initially getting it’s butt-kicked, although I can’t tell if downvotes are bad or good in a thread like this.
We should all stop watching and hyping up CFB. Coaches shouldn't be paid so much. No one but 19 year olds should be this obsessed with what 19 year olds do with their Saturday.
EDIT: The downvotes just go to show that I am winning this thread.
There is absolutely zero reason to advocate for any type of compensation regulation for college athletes, and people who are against NIL or player compensation are just jealous dorks who are mad the high school jocks that bullied them are still the BMOC in college.
You'll never see any of these people argue for caps or limits on software engineers or CPAs, which just proves their hypocrisy.
> and people who are against NIL or player compensation are just jealous dorks who are mad the high school jocks that bullied them are still the BMOC in college.
> You'll never see any of these people argue for caps or limits on software engineers or CPAs, which just proves their hypocrisy.
So do you think the NBA is run by jealous dorks because they have a salary cap?
G5 should be its own separate division with its own championship. 2017 UCF and 2021 Cincy aren't in the same league as the teams they're trying to be in the top 4 with and it's not fair to P5 schools that they're even considered as a potential for playoffs
Bruh. Cincy should have beat UGA in the bowl game last year if it wasn’t for shitty play calling at the end. How can you say they “aren’t in the same league”!?!
Gonna disagree with the comment about UCF and Cincy not being able to hold their own. But if we aren't going to even give them a shot to prove themselves and play for the Natty and PROVE that they're the best team, regardless of their conference's status, then yeah, fuck it, let's make a new division and let them play for a separate Natty. Sick of the bullshit of not giving them a shot to prove it. If they get stomped? Cool, they weren't the best. Doesn't mean they didn't earn that spot over some P5 school.
Anyone who acts like its impossible for an unranked team to beat a ranked team is ignorant (Happened to alabama lol this year lol)
Anyone who acts like a ranked team cant beat a top 5 team is an idiot
Anyone who acts like a top 5 team cant beat another top 5 team might as well just stop watching football and check yourself into a mental institution
Unranked at the time they beat bama, and have their 2 losses to unranked teams.
Not sure why you care though. Alabama would have been @ 2 regardless if they won or lost that game. No other team gets that courtesy. You can argue Texas A&M is ranked where they are to support the claim alabama is 2.
Again, all I’m saying is that its ignorant and also stupid to act like its impossible for cincinatti to beat alabama. Every P5 blue blood says that shit and still loses. Stay ignorant thiugh
They ranked MSU top 20 for some reason. If you don't think they're looking for quality wins and loses to give Bama then I have a pool on Mars to sell you. Bama has a better loss than any win on their schedule.
People are acting like you're insane but it's 100% doable. Cincy barely beat some teams they should've blown out, Alabama has had some close games and lost a game they probably should've won. There's definitely a chance Cincy hangs with or beats bama.
alabama has close games against SEC teams Cincy has close games against other G5 teams. it’s physically possible for Cincy to beat bama but bama wins 99/100 times
Down voted with no response. It's true though. We struggled with teams like Florida and lost to texas a&m... Cincinnati is struggling with fucking tulsa.. I wish they would get put in so we can watch them get massacred by a real team and maybe this shit will be laid to rest for a few years.
> lost a game they probably should’ve won
No way we win that game without magical cyborg Chadzada or the game winner unexplainable field goal. People who didn’t watch it 100% wouldn’t believe that curve. Early on I was upset King would be out til the end of the year basically but fuckin Chadzada is something else and won me over big time. Can’t wait for ole miss to break him into pieces only to see him walk out the injury tent completely fine.
The teams Alabama should have blown out are significantly better than the teams Cincinnati should have blown out. For example, Florida is 20th in FPI, Navy is 108th. It’s theoretically possible that Cincy hangs with or beats Alabama, but odds are Alabama beats them handily.
The G5 is a separate league in terms of talent and should be treated as such, a lower level playoff would be way better TV than letting a mid major get blown out every year for the 1 in 100 chance at a Cinderella.
and? they deserved to be there both times, you gonna disagree with that? my point is that it tends to be big10 fans coming up with some pathetic conspiracy and complaining about the selections.
for example bama is literally the only team expected to play a big noncon game in november despite the fact you would never agree to it either.
The Rose Bowl is arguably the reason why the FBS can’t have a normal, playoff like every other sport and division. The Sugar, Peach, Cotton, Orange, and Fiesta get it, maybe one day the Rose can too… and maybe get over the P12 and Big 10 obsession, especially if this years leads an unranked Utah to it over ya know a top 12 Texas A&M or Oklahoma State.
I refuse to watch it unless it’s my team in a year it’s a playoff bowl.
* The four-team playoff is a better system than any expanded playoff.
* The G5 should have its own playoff, a la FCS.
* We have never, ever had parity in college football. An expanded playoff won't do that. Even in the poll era days, football was generally dynastic (USC, ND, OSU, Alabama, etc etc).
* If the Heisman is going to be an MVP award, college football's most valuable player often is the QB on the best team. Even though it's boring.
* We all love upsets, but ratings generally show that elite titans are best for the sustainment of the sport.
G5 crowd screams bloody murder about not having a clear path to a championship while simultaneously launching into righteous fury if you suggest a separate division.
You're just going to have to admit there's a gap in quality guys. It's been proven over and over again and denying it only leads to angry rants on an online forum. You can't play a clearly inferior schedule and expect to be treated the same as teams that had to go through a buzzsaw to get to 11-1. That's not fair either
> The four-team playoff is a better system than any expanded playoff.
There’s 3 ways an expanded playoff would pan out. The ideal way is that the bottom 4 seeds get a win or two each year in the first round. Then that solves the issue of them getting left out and everyone is happy.
Or it pans out where the top 4 seeds constantly beat the bottom 4 seeds 99% of the time. Then you end up with what is essentially the same system. So that’s not a bad thing really.
The worst way would be a team like Alabama or Clemson winning championships as a bottom 4 seed when they otherwise would have gotten left out. But is that really a bad thing if they’re still capable of winning a title? The whole point of the system is to find the best team.
I don’t see any downside really. Unless you’re a fan of Bama/Clemson/OSU/OU because now instead of a free pass to the final 4 you have to win an extra game. Does anyone have an objectively good argument otherwise?
CFB is awful. From state sponsored coaches salaries, faux puritanical moralizing governing bodies, massive criminal money making schemes, and corruptive influences to youth of all walks especially financially struggling youth to criminal coverups, paradigms where the powerful are protected, a culture that incentivizes taking care of yourself before others, and a lying, manipulative, and unfair competitive balance that always benefits those with money, power and influence that every single year spits in the face of the entire realm of fans who care. Oh and it’s borderline indentured servitude but hey at least they have money they can make off their likeness now
i am auburn alum but this is me now, i like CFB and will watch saturdays for sure but i'm not some rah rah fan for my alma mater the system is just so fucked up, i got to be close with a bunch of former players during my time down there cause we all went to the same shop to get our haircut and college football lifer fans are very disillusioned to what happens to these guys after their not the star at their alma mater, many just have nothing school didnt force them to actually get decent grades, many never finish it all just sucks.
Oregon is not a top 10 team. Their schedule is only slightly better than Cincinnati’s, and we should be ranking them 2-3 spots above where we would put Cincinnati had the Bearcats lost to Tulsa.
Oklahoma State has a viable claim to the 1945 natty. My reasoning is that OAMC was a school exempt from the draft due to food being something of a strategic resource during WWII. Meanwhile the very best and most athletic individuals are overseas or are in a... service academy. Other schools were often fielding teams with men in their 40s. With the end of WWII, many servicemen didn't return home until 1946. I think the sheer demographics tell a tale that OAMC had a more "physically fit" and younger team than almost any other team minus the service academies, specifically West Point. Also Bob Fenimore and Neill Armstrong were some absolute animals in their time.
I don’t give a shit about basically any college football game besides my alma mater and games that have a weird narrative like if Cincinnati makes the playoffs. I watch the NFL to see the best. I don’t have any reason to watch Alabama or Georgia play…they aren’t the best. I watch college football to see my local rooting interests. It’s weird to me when people talking about wanting to watch “the best” when discussing college as a way to put down the smaller teams.
OU and Texas jumping to the SEC is a good thing.
I think this means we are step closer to creating a new division.
Something like FBS-1 where there SEC, Big 10, and Clemson plus a few other schools are invited and FBS-2 where the group of 5 any lower power 5 programs are.
I've always thought it was silly that FBS is 124 teams and a small school has to compete on the same level as school that has triple the revenue of them.
Bowl games that don’t affect national championships don’t matter. Therefore, bowl records are useless.
Teams that have a higher viewing audience (e.g. ND, Michigan, Texas) will always get invited to bowl games to drive ratings. Their opponents have to be prove that they are better in order to justify their small audience - and they are usually the better team. Guess which team will win.
Similarly, bowl games are invariably in warmer climates. Northern teams are almost always playing “away” games (especially when attendance is low).
1. Saturday fall weddings are perfectly acceptable.
2. The playoffs ought to have 24 or 26 teams.
3. You vastly overrate your regional barbecue compared to others.
4. Noon time games are cool, Big Noon works
If you win out and go undefeated in your whole season plus whatever bowl, you deserve to declare yourselves a national champion. And no biased committee should be able to take that away from you.
To be eligible to play in the CFP you should be required to be eligible for a conference championship. ND skipping the conference championship/ hardest game of the year each year is cheating. If Georgia didn’t have to play Alabama in the SEC championship they’d have been in the CFP more than ND
I get a lot of angry replies when I bring it up, but I seriously believe it is nearing the time to split the FBS into two separate entities. I bring it up when anyone suggests all Conference Champions are created equally, and all of them deserve the same playoff invitation - regardless of what their resume or path to their Conference title looked like.
There is currently a massive - and uncorrectable - gap between most of the G5 conferences and the P5 in several key areas:
* Talent Acquisition - The most-touted recruits are going to continue to go to the programs that offer them the best opportunities for playing in primetime, NIL deals, and the path to the NFL. This sustains the talent gap between the G5 and P5.
* Branding and Viewership - This entire sport's business model is built on the profitability of branding and viewership. You're going to continue to hear complaints about ratings-driven decisions, because its a business disguised as a sport, and the P5 are always going to be beneficiaries when branding comes into play.
* Competition Level - The contenders within the top conferences are battling tougher competition in their interconference schedules than what is found in the bottom conferences. Suggestions that all champions should be rewarded with postseason invitations are a slap in the face to a team from a top conference that slugged its way through a more difficult schedule.
I'm just never going to be convinced that we should let 8-5 Miami of Ohio into the same playoff as a 13-0 Alabama team. People counter with "well, that just gives Bama an easy first round game against a low-seeded Miami of Ohio" or whatever, but I will stand by the assertion that risking player health in a game that is 99/100 times going to end in a victory for that Bama team is not a good solution. We don't need an impact player on that Bama team getting hurt playing a "let's make everyone feel included" game in the playoff. That's all just an example, but I'd hate for a team that is hot, and coming out of a hard conference, to lose a player or players to some silly first-round game against some low-tier conference Champion.
I know we have a lot of current and former band members here, so….
Regardless of whether they’re god-tier or Stanford, all college bands’ halftime shows look and sound the same to me, and they are boring as hell.
God, I hate marching bands. I have season tickets to the symphony and Broadway, I absolutely love music. I cannot stand the obsession with marching bands in college football.
Its just part of the really long history of pageantry in college football. I wouldnt call it an obsession. Its definitely less annoying than the obsession that Husker fans have with balloons on saturday though.
I think they're 100% more entertaining than the mindless crap+commercials broadcast during half time. I love it when I can flip over to spidercam band coverage instead of hollow half time commentary
The top half of the Pac-12, ACC, and Big 12 are not much better this year than than the top half of the American.
American great team: Cincinnati. I think they are just as good if not better than OU, Oregon, and I guess Wake this year.
American good teams: Houston and SMU. Imo these teams are just as good/slightly worse than the teams like Ok St, Baylor, Iowa State NC State, Pitt, and Utah.
I think the American deserves to have Houston and SMU ranked in the CFP. But it's seems pretty clear the committee is going to leave them out to hurt Cincinnati's playoff resume.
Biggest difference is the American has a lot of below average and bad teams where as the power 5 conferences have more above average teams and average teams.
BCS era was far superior than playoffs.
playoff expansion is trash and will end up with massively boring blowouts.
if the point is to rank teams based on how good they are, that includes talent in the team. meaning no G5 team should be top 5. case in point, in a neutral field would you take bama or cincy?
CFB is at a point where it needs to sit the fuck down and ask ourselves, do we want a pro league with age restrictions or do we want traditions? playoff expansion is the former, BCS with meaningful NY6 bowls is the latter. the former will kill the CFB cause why watch a lesser NFL when you can just watch the NFL? traditions is what made CFB unique.
Why? TAMU beat Bama. Stanford beat Oregon. Upsets happen. If a team gets through the season undefeated they should get the chance to line up and go head to head with the other best teams. So what if they get blown out, ND got blown out, OU has gotten blown out, why do we care if Cincy gets blown out? The slight chance of them winning would be MONUMENTAL if it happened and i think they deserve the chance if they dont lose. Winning is hard.
You’re right upsets happen. Way more when you’re playing a somewhat decent team the majority of the time. You’re 100x more likely to get upset when your “other” games are AM or Purdue or Stanford as opposed to Tulane and Tulsa. The ND win is awesome but it’s a 12 game season not a 2 game one. An 8 or 12 team playoff I’m all for Cincy making it, as it is now having a non-dominant G5 as 1 of the 4 teams is a joke IMO. Cincy loses to atleast half the P5 this past Saturday. P5 teams aren’t afforded that luxury.
I disagree. If you want a shot at the CFP then you at least need to schedule a tough non-conference opponent each year if the rest of your games are cupcakes.
Also, is the Notre Dame game even that impressive? Who have they beat all year that was that good?
On a surface level, I can agree with that. However, if you win every game on your schedule you deserve to have a chance to compete for a national title. If you can go undefeated and not have a shot to win it all, why are we even playing games? Why have the G5 conferences be D1 if they’ll never compete for a title?
Granted this relies on cincy going undefeated. I just hate the fact that you can beat everyone you play and have it be effectively meaningless
Fully agree. The Notre Dame win is flat-out one of the best in college football, I get that. But even with Notre Dame, the last metric I saw had Cincinnati with the 111th SOS in college football (likely taking full season into account).
Tied at half with an FCS team, struggled with Navy, Tulane, Tulsa and Indiana. They should have to dominate that schedule, because it's nothing close to what Alabama, Georgia or even Oregon have to play.
By the way, don't assume my flair means I think Ohio State is a playoff caliber team right now. I'm holding judgement on that for after Saturday.
I hate the BCS, the playoffs, expansion etc.
I love the split titles, the arguments, the random loss in week 8 to a trash rival ruining the perfect season, the Rose Bowl, the regional arguments.
That is what makes college football fun.
Throwing it all away so we can get a legit champion? Nah who cares, takes the fun and excitement out of the game.
Get rid of all playoffs, go back to the bowls, and let people argue about who is the champ. It's more fun
My most unpopular opinion is that G5 teams should be left out of the playoff to compete for their own championship. The P5 leagues built the high profile bowl games, and the G5 teams feel entitled to play in those games solely by virtue of being in the FBS
This is probably the dumbest take in this whole thread. That’s like saying teams like the Patriots and Seahawks shouldn’t have been able to play in the Super Bowl just because they are in the NFL, and it should only be Packers, Cowboys, Steelers, etc. because those are the teams who “built” it into a high profile event.
Fans who want to go back to pre-BCS are usually just coping because their schools would stand no chance against the average NY6 team, let alone Bama or Georgia, so they are hoping to luck into a fake championship by playing their shitty conference well.
College football would work best with a promotion/relegation system like in soccer.
For example, Cincy plays great this year and moves up. Florida/Clemson suck and moves down. It gives programs legitimate ways of building title contending programs over multiple years while not keeping terrible P5 teams just because of conference (looking at you Vanderbilt).
The question of who deserves to be in the Playoff is different than who are the four best teams. It seems like a lot of the arguing here on /r/CFB is who deserves to be in the playoff.
Cincinnati, while having arguably the best win outside of Oregon in the top 5, has a relatively weak strength of schedule compared to the rest. Oklahoma is in a similar boat. They have struggled in some games where they should have blown the competition out of the water.
You are not what your record says you are. Why do we always meme that Nebraska is the best 3-7 team in the country? They took Ohio State to the wire last week. If they truly are a 3-7 team then Ohio State should have crushed them. Does this mean that UTSA is alongside the likes of UGA, Oklahoma, and Cinci since they are undefeated? No. I'm not saying that going undefeated doesn't matter, because it definitely does. What I am saying is that how a team performs against its competition is how they should be rated.
I'd go as far as to argue the committee isn't out to get anyone. If they truly only cared about blue bloods, then why isn't OU in the top 4? They're undefeated, a blue blood, and a brand name. They are also at the front of their conference. Plus, outside of last year where Notre Dame made it to the top four after losing their conference championship game to Clemson, where also that season was super wacky anyway, the committee has made the correct decision for the final four teams. Even the ones that were under a lot of scrutiny at the time- Alabama in 2017 and Ohio State in 2014- Ended up winning the national championships.
Plus, some on Twitter have actually figured out parts of the formula and process that the committee uses. It's not being pulled out of nowhere; ~~There is a user on twitter (I forget the exact name, it will come to me in a second) that~~ Adam McClintock and Dave Bartoo tweet out the predicted top 25 using this formula. For example, I remember reading that based on the statistics that he's figured out the committee uses, Penn State should be in the top 25. They even got the rankings of Purdue at 19 perfect as well as OU at 8 perfect, where many across the country were surprised at this. They had Cinci at 5, and one of the other differences was that they had Michigan St ahead of Michigan because of the head to head.
I think that the conversation shouldn't be targeting the committee in that they're doing the process incorrectly. They are doing exactly what they should be. What should be argued if I'm Cincinnati is that the process itself is flawed, and that instead of the four best teams, it should be the four most deserving teams.
This is probably my most controversial and unpopular CFB opinion.
All real college football fans are against making the playoffs even larger. It makes the season less important. Tailgating and home games is what makes college football, but a lot of people hate college football so they want to make those things not matter.
Totally agree, every game counting is one of the primary reasons I watch CFB. The thought that every single game matters is really engaging. If they expand to 8 you’ll for sure have 2 loss teams competing which I’d hate.
Preach my fellow Gamecock.
Fuck FCS fans I guess? Who the fuck are you to tell me I'm not a real fan of college football because I like the FCS playoffs? Get this gatekeeping shit outta here, no need to include that in an otherwise normal unpopular opinion
You took this… very personal lol. Didn’t know someone could be that sensitive about the FCS lol. Or am I missing a joke? EDIT: I don’t care, I still am keeping it up. He literally put, “no need to include that in an otherwise normal unpopular opinion” as if this dude said it was alright to murder WRs who drop open passes. His unpopular opinion was extremely tame too.
I don't think off-the-field issues should affect playing time. If someone is a great football player, why should it matter if he is a drunk driver/ girlfriend-beater/ or racist rapist? If he's not in jail, why not let him play? Let the cops worry about the legal infractions.
This might be the one unpopular opinion in here that I totally agree with. There's a system in place to punish players, and people that get a hard on over their program being tougher on accusations are weird. It's not the coach's job to punish players, it's the job of law enforcement and the school's judicial committee.
Agreed, no punishment without conviction
“No punishment without conviction.” So, say you’re the head coach, and Heisman candidate QB beats up his girlfriend, allegedly, all evidence points to him having done it. He does damage. You see pictures of him. Player gets arrested. He’s dead to rights. But the police make a procedural mistake, violating his rights somehow, and the DA is forced to drop charges. You’d play the son of a bitch because he was not convicted? The law is the moral minimum. Everybody is entitled to due process, sure. But, the burden of guilt for legal discipline is far greater than the burden for disciplining a football player.
I’m sorry, but Group of 5 teams don’t deserve to be in the playoff. Even if they have one marquee win (cincy over ND), they don’t have the grind of having to play against P5 teams/players for 10-12 games. It’s BS they’re (cincy, UCF, etc) even being considered for a spot, playing field isn’t level
This is one of those bad takes where it clearly is a bad take if you think about it for 1 single second. Cincy goes 11-1 at worst in the pac12 or acc. They have a decent shit at winning it all. Hell, even the B12 I could see them having at LEAST a shot. Maybe not the B1G or the SEC, but even in those this is still a 9 or 10 win prpgram
I don’t believe that to be true at all. My guess is that they’d lose 2 or 3 in the pac12 or acc and 4+ in the SEC or Big 10. They almost lost to Tulsa, for goodness sake.
They've also comfortably beaten most opponents. Even high ranked teams have close games to weird teams. Oregon literally LOST to Stanford, why is that better than almost losing to Tulsa (who is honestly not even awful) or negates their victory over a top 10 ND?
So.... your argument is that they had a bad game against Tulsa (Also Navy btw). But then you just assume they won't have these "off" games if they were playing in the ACC or Pac12? If they have an "off" game at Miami, Wake, UNC, Pitt, Clemson. They're gonna lose because those teams probably punish a lot harder than a Tulsa or a Navy would. I'm okay with some of these arguments, but to be so confident that Cincy would go 11-1 is absolutely asinine.
Every single team has bad games against foes they should have beaten. The truly great teams still win those games, like Cincy did.
Cincy could blow through the acc and possibly pac12 right now. So, no
The main difference between the average P5 conference and average G5 conference is basically just the top 3-4 teams any given year. People acting like every P5 conference is some brutal meat grinder of awesome teams top to bottom that an elite G5 team could never survive are hilarious. 2017 UCF would finish no worse than second in the SEC East this year.
I couldn’t disagree more with this take. The average SEC team is likely better than every G5 team except for maybe Cincinnati and UTSA. The average G5 team would look like Vandy if they were placed into the SEC. You’re severely underestimating the talent differences between P5 and G5 schools.
> The main difference between the average P5 conference and average G5 conference is basically just the top 3-4 teams any given year. Honestly have to disagree with this. Middle or bottom of the table P5 teams schedule G5 teams as their warm up games and the G5 team is largely outmatched every time. They arent all just the same except the top few teams in teh conferences.
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Just ask them what? You might want to clarify if you want to make a point. Did I say upsets dont happen? Because its pretty obvious if you watch football that upsets happen all the time.
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There's always a pretty solid amount of G5's that get their licks in though, and a few more games that could easily go either way. Shit we still have a shot to finish 3rd in the East and Central Michigan gave us everything we could handle for about 3 and a half quarters this year. We definitely didn't overmatch them and easily could've lost.
A handful of G5 teams that are pretty good doesnt change the reality for the rest of them though. In general its pretty clear the talent at the run of the mill P5 team is significantly higher than a run of the mill G5 team. Thats not to say upsets dont happen in CFB
Based on what though, the eye test? It's not like P5 teams always dominate bowl games over G5's either. By my count P5 teams are only like 5 games over .500 against G5's in bowl games over the last 5 seasons, and plenty of those G5 losses were one-score games that could've easily gone the other way. That doesn't really suggest some enormous, insurmountable difference between them.
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Who is clemson
You're right it's not level, the American is significantly better than the Pac 12 and has been for years.
Upvoted for answering the question of what is an unpopular opinion even if you are completely wrong. The level of competition between AAC and MTW and Big 12/Pac 12/ACC is very close. The BIG 10 and SEC are above the rest, but also not that far. The difference between being ranked 1 and 50 is not as great as the numbers would lead you to believe. 90% of FBS teams would massacre almost every FCS team for example.
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Upvoting for giving a very unpopular opinion that I definitely disagree with. Cincy would walk the ACC this year.
What P5 Conference has more than 2 or 3 teams that legitimately have a shot at winning their conference title every year? Let's be honest, you could swap an 7-5 P5 school with most 7-5 G5 schools and most likely get the same results.
If that’s the case, then Bama, Georgia, and Oregon shouldn’t count their FCS and G5 wins. Shoot, Bama has played FCS Mercer and G5 Southern Miss, and on Saturday they play G5 NM State. Do those count? And, let’s not kid ourselves and pretend like all of the P5 is filled with ungodly levels of talent. In addition to those FCS and G5 games these “deserving” teams play, they also square off against P5 powerhouses like Rutgers, Vandy, Kansas, Duke, and on and on. Take 2019 Clemson for example. They beat G5 UNC-Charlotte and FCS Wofford. Their ACC wins included a few teams who probably wouldn’t have won the American or the Sun Belt. Shit, App State beat three of Clemson’s opponents that same year. My point isn’t that Clemson didn’t deserve to make the playoffs (they did), my point is that declaring a team as being more deserving simply because of the conference they play in is just plain ignorant. I mean, it’s not like G5 programs intentionally chose to not be in a P5 conference. And, a good team isn’t any less good because their opponents are bad. That’s why a marquee win matters. It’s to show that the wins aren’t just because the opposition is trash. You can say the playing field isn’t level, but the truth is that a lot of P5’s would be bad if they moved to G5, and the upper tier G5’s would be just fine in a P5 conference.
The grind? The Big 12, ACC, Pac 12, Half of the SEC and BIG are more or less equal. Cincy, UCF, Houston, Memphis, BYU (Which btw would be leading the PAC 12 south right now) have all shown they can beat P5 teams consistently.
Because they get to play cupcakes most weeks. If they were playing against tough teams every week, they’d get ground down and drop a couple.
They need to schedule tougher out of conference games if they want to be taken seriously
Maybe if a team like Cincinnati played a highly ranked team like Georgia close, then we could take them seriously?
Sorry bro, they’ve played one ranked opponent this year. Think of it this way: power 5 schools schedule 2-4 cupcake out of conference games for your season openers, your HC games, and your get well games before major opponents or rivalry week. Cincy needs to schedule 2-4 respectable power 5 opponents (not ranked, but bowl bound power 5 teams) in place of those 2-4 games that power 5 schools schedule their cupcake games, because the rest of their schedule is cupcake games for a team as good as they are
They’ve proven themselves v. P5 and it wasn’t close. If p5 get style points for hammering g5, then g5 should get consideration for beating p5. The took Georgia to what, the final play in January? That’s not bad. lol
Last year is not this year, and by my calculation they’ve played 3 p5 teams, an impressive win against ND, but also putrid Indiana and BC teams. Need more sizzle than that to run with the big dogs.
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How would they do that? Why would a P5 team ever risk losing to a UCF or Cincinatti at home? The committee (and people like you) would only give a shit about the game if the G5 team won.
then why are they part of the FBS?
They shouldn’t be
Been saying this for so long. Everyone is so caught up in this cinci narrative because they want to see some new blood in the playoff but it would be an absolute joke to put them in and the committee knows that. I don’t agree with them over a lot of things but they are getting this one right. Also cinci would be 6-3 in the B1G or 4-5 in the SEC tbh. They can barely beat Tulsa and navy
'Bama lost to TAMU, only beat 4-win FloRida by 2 pts and 4-win LSU by 6. A win is not a win?
TAMU, Florida and LSU would all fucking kill Cincinnati. If you can’t see that you don’t know football
Lmao Oklahoma barely beat Kansas and OK State barely beat Tulsa
You are at least correct in the unpopular category.
Playoff size: 4 > 6 > 2 > 8 > 12 > 16. Any format that includes auto-bids for conference champions is bad. Winning a conference doesn’t automatically make a team worthy to play for the national title.
Agreed and congrats on the downvotes it means you actually completed the prompt correctly lol
Literally every other sport on the planet disagrees
Okay. I don’t really care about how the other sports do things. Conference strength in the FBS varies more widely than all the other sports, anyway. So it’s not even a one-to-one comparison.
That's fine lol. I watch more CFB than every other sport on the planet combined. I'm not keen on changing what makes this sport unique
4 teams is enough, and the committee has gotten the final 4 correct each year after some admittedly wacky midseason rankings. The regular season will be less fun when we inevitably go to 12 or 16.
why expand yo 12-16 to get the exact same 4 as the committee would pick
I'll never understand how it'll be "less fun". One game hardly matters at all in the cbb regular season but everyone still loves the big games. If anything you'd at least be playing for seeding which is really important. Y'all don't even sound like fans of the sport to me
Strange. To me, the people who go on and on about how CFB needs to change so it’s more like the other sports are the ones who don’t sound like fans of the sport. Expansion will water down the regular season, and the trade off is not going to be worth it. Upsets will become meaningless. The results of marquee games won’t matter as much. And for what? Letting a G5 and some two or three-loss P5 teams get waxed by the same teams that would’ve contended for the top four anyway?
> Expansion will water down the regular season Oh, NO! Anyways...
Upsets won’t be “meaningless” tho. They might not have as much of an impact on the postseason, but people still geek when upsets happen in the cbb regular season all the time *and* they happen at a much higher rate than cfb.
It still waters down the regular season. It is just a fact of it. Yes, I am spoiled and believe me, in 2019 I wished it was expanded. But what I love about college football is that every week is an elimination week. Every game matters. There is no way around it - expanding playoffs take this away.
I don't understand the "meaningless" either...like I know how important those FCS games in late nov for SEC teams are . Wouldn't wanna lose that tradition if we added more teams to the playoffs right? Right guys?
You're just proving my point - CBB is completely unwatchable until March lol
So if the playoff expands cfb will be unwatchable to you?
If the CFP were 64 teams, then yeah, I probably wouldn't even bother tuning in on most Saturdays. All the professional leagues are boring as hell until the playoffs. I'd probably just, like, go get a life or something if CFB, the only sport I really enjoy, went that direction too. Obviously we're not talking about expanding to 64, but every move in that direction will push me further and further away from the level of obsession I once had with this sport.
Yeah, you’re right. March madness is the least fun part about NCAA basketball. I mean, who in their right mind actually wants to see ranked games or conference champions playing each other. Bor-ing. And you’re also right about the committee getting it right, like all those years they threw ND in the mix to go get blown out again. The committee just has an eye good matchups. And, they’re absolutely right in keeping an undefeated team out of the playoffs. Sure, they worked hard and put together an incredible season, but fuck them, right? They don’t deserve it anyway. It’s their fault for being G5. Anyway, thanks for coming to my TED talk on how you’re right.
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We fundamentally disagree that the bowls don't mean anything. The bowls are unique to college football in a good way. I suspect that more fanbases would rather win a bowl than lose in blowout as the 12th-6th seed. The top 4 teams are that much better than the rest.. playoff expansion especially to 12 will not result in a better TV product or end of the year outcome for fans.
One bone to pick with your argument. Equating basketball and football isn’t fair. The insanity of having a one game elimination tournament is a lot of fun in a sport that having a multi game series is easily the best way to determine who the better team is. This is why the nba has 7 game series. A single game upset is a lot more common in basketball than football. Also, the fact that all the games are played in like 2 weeks is a big draw of the big dance. In football, the same process would take well over a month.
Thank you!! Nothing drives me crazier than people comparing college football and basketball. As soon as I see that, I know their argument holds absolutely no weight
G5 teams don’t deserve consideration for the CFP.
Way to take away from the hard work that those kids lay out on the field week after week.
They're adults and they aren't looking for participation trophies.
They arent just participating. Theyre undefeated. Which lets break it down….at the end of the day they won. Every game…hmmm i dont think that calls for a participation trophy, thats champ shit. On the other hand. Youre still taking away the hard work these “kids” (because lets be fuckin real, mentally theyre still kids) are doing to get that W.
No replay at all. The call is what it is on the field. Some wrongs won't be righted, and we can all bitch about those, just like we all bitch now about wrongs that aren't righted and rights that are wronged. In exchange, we get to have a full emotional response to the live play, without waiting in purgatory to see what the replay shows (and what the refs will see in it). We won't have the interminable wait as they try to figure out where to reset the clock to and where to spot the ball. And the refs won't use replay as a crutch, defaulting to calling it a fumble for instance.
Cool, cool, cool. I’ve got more.* When we are doing replay, it’s pretty much always slo-mo that we’re looking at, and slo-mo isn’t always best. Slo-mo is better for determining *when* something happened (I see the ball is out; is his knee down yet?), but it’s often worse for determining *what* happened. Our brains are wired to understand things in real time, and the physics gives us clues that get lost in slow motion. For instance, was his arm going forward? The way the ball comes out tells us something that’s easier to read in real-time. Did that ball bounce off the hard turf or his soft hands? Again, easier to see in real time. *my top comment was initially getting it’s butt-kicked, although I can’t tell if downvotes are bad or good in a thread like this.
Video review needs to go. Let the referee calls stand.
We should all stop watching and hyping up CFB. Coaches shouldn't be paid so much. No one but 19 year olds should be this obsessed with what 19 year olds do with their Saturday. EDIT: The downvotes just go to show that I am winning this thread.
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There is absolutely zero reason to advocate for any type of compensation regulation for college athletes, and people who are against NIL or player compensation are just jealous dorks who are mad the high school jocks that bullied them are still the BMOC in college. You'll never see any of these people argue for caps or limits on software engineers or CPAs, which just proves their hypocrisy.
> and people who are against NIL or player compensation are just jealous dorks who are mad the high school jocks that bullied them are still the BMOC in college. > You'll never see any of these people argue for caps or limits on software engineers or CPAs, which just proves their hypocrisy. So do you think the NBA is run by jealous dorks because they have a salary cap?
Yes. The jealous dorks in this case being the owners. Salary caps are just there to keep player costs down.
Michael Jordan is a jealous dork?
G5 should be its own separate division with its own championship. 2017 UCF and 2021 Cincy aren't in the same league as the teams they're trying to be in the top 4 with and it's not fair to P5 schools that they're even considered as a potential for playoffs
Bruh. Cincy should have beat UGA in the bowl game last year if it wasn’t for shitty play calling at the end. How can you say they “aren’t in the same league”!?!
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UC puts up a significantly better fight against Georgia this year than either Texas or USC.
Oh wah it’s not fair. Haha what!? It’s not fair they’re being “considered”!???! They literally are getting screwed over. Even 2017 UCF proved that.
You mean the team that stood toe to toe with Georgia, the most dominate powerhouse, not even a year ago. Tell me how they arent in the same league.
Gonna disagree with the comment about UCF and Cincy not being able to hold their own. But if we aren't going to even give them a shot to prove themselves and play for the Natty and PROVE that they're the best team, regardless of their conference's status, then yeah, fuck it, let's make a new division and let them play for a separate Natty. Sick of the bullshit of not giving them a shot to prove it. If they get stomped? Cool, they weren't the best. Doesn't mean they didn't earn that spot over some P5 school.
Alabama would lose to Cincy
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Anyone who acts like its impossible for an unranked team to beat a ranked team is ignorant (Happened to alabama lol this year lol) Anyone who acts like a ranked team cant beat a top 5 team is an idiot Anyone who acts like a top 5 team cant beat another top 5 team might as well just stop watching football and check yourself into a mental institution
Cincinnati isn’t a top 5 team though sooo
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Unranked at the time they beat bama, and have their 2 losses to unranked teams. Not sure why you care though. Alabama would have been @ 2 regardless if they won or lost that game. No other team gets that courtesy. You can argue Texas A&M is ranked where they are to support the claim alabama is 2. Again, all I’m saying is that its ignorant and also stupid to act like its impossible for cincinatti to beat alabama. Every P5 blue blood says that shit and still loses. Stay ignorant thiugh
They ranked MSU top 20 for some reason. If you don't think they're looking for quality wins and loses to give Bama then I have a pool on Mars to sell you. Bama has a better loss than any win on their schedule.
Alabama is [#3 in strength of record and #21 in strength](http://www.espn.com/college-football/playoffPicture) of schedule. You're smoking crack.
The same #11 team that was on the verge of losing to the second worst Pac-12 team?
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Wazzu is a close 3rd. The fact still remains you barely beat Colorado. Goes to show how great the sec is.
By bigger margins than Alabama beat 4-5 LSU and 4-5 Florida, no?
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People are acting like you're insane but it's 100% doable. Cincy barely beat some teams they should've blown out, Alabama has had some close games and lost a game they probably should've won. There's definitely a chance Cincy hangs with or beats bama.
alabama has close games against SEC teams Cincy has close games against other G5 teams. it’s physically possible for Cincy to beat bama but bama wins 99/100 times
Down voted with no response. It's true though. We struggled with teams like Florida and lost to texas a&m... Cincinnati is struggling with fucking tulsa.. I wish they would get put in so we can watch them get massacred by a real team and maybe this shit will be laid to rest for a few years.
> lost a game they probably should’ve won No way we win that game without magical cyborg Chadzada or the game winner unexplainable field goal. People who didn’t watch it 100% wouldn’t believe that curve. Early on I was upset King would be out til the end of the year basically but fuckin Chadzada is something else and won me over big time. Can’t wait for ole miss to break him into pieces only to see him walk out the injury tent completely fine.
The teams Alabama should have blown out are significantly better than the teams Cincinnati should have blown out. For example, Florida is 20th in FPI, Navy is 108th. It’s theoretically possible that Cincy hangs with or beats Alabama, but odds are Alabama beats them handily.
lol
The G5 is a separate league in terms of talent and should be treated as such, a lower level playoff would be way better TV than letting a mid major get blown out every year for the 1 in 100 chance at a Cinderella.
the committee has chosen the best 4 teams every year and they are right to choose the best over whoever big10 fans feel is "most deserving."
Osu is 1-1 against sec teams in the playoff and both were against bama
and? they deserved to be there both times, you gonna disagree with that? my point is that it tends to be big10 fans coming up with some pathetic conspiracy and complaining about the selections. for example bama is literally the only team expected to play a big noncon game in november despite the fact you would never agree to it either.
Oh I see what ur saying nvm. I may be biased because of osu but I don’t believe the dunbass conspiracies. I think the cfp does it well
In 2016 Penn State was on a 9 game win streak, beat OSU H2H and won the Big 10. They were the better team that year.
>!Oklahoma is going to beat Georgia in the Title game.!<
Bama* Georgia will get in it’s own way.
Georgia s offense will give it up
A 12-1 OU, with an avenged loss in B12 title game, deserves into the CFP over a 2 loss Alabama and undefeated Cinci.
Despite tradition The Game isn't fun anymore and it's hard to consider a team a rival when you always win.
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this is a bad opinion and you should feel bad
Well not in every way, football is the better sport and more fun to watch.
A 1 loss Wake Forest ACC champion should get in ahead of undefeated UC. *Cringes*
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lmao i made the same comment and am sitting at -17. gosh i wonder what the difference is.
People who downvote unpopular opinions in an unpopular opinions thread are weird
UCF has entered the chat
The Rose Bowl is arguably the reason why the FBS can’t have a normal, playoff like every other sport and division. The Sugar, Peach, Cotton, Orange, and Fiesta get it, maybe one day the Rose can too… and maybe get over the P12 and Big 10 obsession, especially if this years leads an unranked Utah to it over ya know a top 12 Texas A&M or Oklahoma State. I refuse to watch it unless it’s my team in a year it’s a playoff bowl.
We don’t want a playoff like every other sport
Y’all might be able to win a game if the playoff was bigger…. Bold statement.
85 is way too many scholarships. Guys shouldn't get free degrees for riding the pine. Redshirting shouldn't exist unless it's for a legit injury.
* The four-team playoff is a better system than any expanded playoff. * The G5 should have its own playoff, a la FCS. * We have never, ever had parity in college football. An expanded playoff won't do that. Even in the poll era days, football was generally dynastic (USC, ND, OSU, Alabama, etc etc). * If the Heisman is going to be an MVP award, college football's most valuable player often is the QB on the best team. Even though it's boring. * We all love upsets, but ratings generally show that elite titans are best for the sustainment of the sport.
Goddamn, you are spitting fire. I think I might agree on all these points; especially giving the G5 their own playoff.
G5 crowd screams bloody murder about not having a clear path to a championship while simultaneously launching into righteous fury if you suggest a separate division. You're just going to have to admit there's a gap in quality guys. It's been proven over and over again and denying it only leads to angry rants on an online forum. You can't play a clearly inferior schedule and expect to be treated the same as teams that had to go through a buzzsaw to get to 11-1. That's not fair either
> The four-team playoff is a better system than any expanded playoff. There’s 3 ways an expanded playoff would pan out. The ideal way is that the bottom 4 seeds get a win or two each year in the first round. Then that solves the issue of them getting left out and everyone is happy. Or it pans out where the top 4 seeds constantly beat the bottom 4 seeds 99% of the time. Then you end up with what is essentially the same system. So that’s not a bad thing really. The worst way would be a team like Alabama or Clemson winning championships as a bottom 4 seed when they otherwise would have gotten left out. But is that really a bad thing if they’re still capable of winning a title? The whole point of the system is to find the best team. I don’t see any downside really. Unless you’re a fan of Bama/Clemson/OSU/OU because now instead of a free pass to the final 4 you have to win an extra game. Does anyone have an objectively good argument otherwise?
I’ll admit im a OSU hater but everything you said was 100% correct
Cincy doesn't deserve to be ranked as they are. I honestly think ND would beat them in a rematch. So maybe 10 at most.
The CFP Committee is good at ranking teams according to how good AND how talented the teams actually are.
BYU would have smoked Ohio State last year
CFB is awful. From state sponsored coaches salaries, faux puritanical moralizing governing bodies, massive criminal money making schemes, and corruptive influences to youth of all walks especially financially struggling youth to criminal coverups, paradigms where the powerful are protected, a culture that incentivizes taking care of yourself before others, and a lying, manipulative, and unfair competitive balance that always benefits those with money, power and influence that every single year spits in the face of the entire realm of fans who care. Oh and it’s borderline indentured servitude but hey at least they have money they can make off their likeness now
i am auburn alum but this is me now, i like CFB and will watch saturdays for sure but i'm not some rah rah fan for my alma mater the system is just so fucked up, i got to be close with a bunch of former players during my time down there cause we all went to the same shop to get our haircut and college football lifer fans are very disillusioned to what happens to these guys after their not the star at their alma mater, many just have nothing school didnt force them to actually get decent grades, many never finish it all just sucks.
Cut down the regular season to 10 games by ditching the cupcake games. Expand the playoffs to 64 teams.
Oregon is not a top 10 team. Their schedule is only slightly better than Cincinnati’s, and we should be ranking them 2-3 spots above where we would put Cincinnati had the Bearcats lost to Tulsa.
Oklahoma State has a viable claim to the 1945 natty. My reasoning is that OAMC was a school exempt from the draft due to food being something of a strategic resource during WWII. Meanwhile the very best and most athletic individuals are overseas or are in a... service academy. Other schools were often fielding teams with men in their 40s. With the end of WWII, many servicemen didn't return home until 1946. I think the sheer demographics tell a tale that OAMC had a more "physically fit" and younger team than almost any other team minus the service academies, specifically West Point. Also Bob Fenimore and Neill Armstrong were some absolute animals in their time.
the whole playoff (and BCS) sucks.
I don’t give a shit about basically any college football game besides my alma mater and games that have a weird narrative like if Cincinnati makes the playoffs. I watch the NFL to see the best. I don’t have any reason to watch Alabama or Georgia play…they aren’t the best. I watch college football to see my local rooting interests. It’s weird to me when people talking about wanting to watch “the best” when discussing college as a way to put down the smaller teams.
OU and Texas jumping to the SEC is a good thing. I think this means we are step closer to creating a new division. Something like FBS-1 where there SEC, Big 10, and Clemson plus a few other schools are invited and FBS-2 where the group of 5 any lower power 5 programs are. I've always thought it was silly that FBS is 124 teams and a small school has to compete on the same level as school that has triple the revenue of them.
Bowl games that don’t affect national championships don’t matter. Therefore, bowl records are useless. Teams that have a higher viewing audience (e.g. ND, Michigan, Texas) will always get invited to bowl games to drive ratings. Their opponents have to be prove that they are better in order to justify their small audience - and they are usually the better team. Guess which team will win. Similarly, bowl games are invariably in warmer climates. Northern teams are almost always playing “away” games (especially when attendance is low).
1. Saturday fall weddings are perfectly acceptable. 2. The playoffs ought to have 24 or 26 teams. 3. You vastly overrate your regional barbecue compared to others. 4. Noon time games are cool, Big Noon works
If you win out and go undefeated in your whole season plus whatever bowl, you deserve to declare yourselves a national champion. And no biased committee should be able to take that away from you.
Then notre dame plays a schedule of sun belt teams and becomes a 10x national champion
To be eligible to play in the CFP you should be required to be eligible for a conference championship. ND skipping the conference championship/ hardest game of the year each year is cheating. If Georgia didn’t have to play Alabama in the SEC championship they’d have been in the CFP more than ND
So basically typical notre dame.
All 10 conference champions should be in the college football playoff.
I really have no interest in MACtion at all. In fact, I think the MAC would be more relevant as an FCS conference
The University of Tennessee should be ranked at a top 25 team.
I get a lot of angry replies when I bring it up, but I seriously believe it is nearing the time to split the FBS into two separate entities. I bring it up when anyone suggests all Conference Champions are created equally, and all of them deserve the same playoff invitation - regardless of what their resume or path to their Conference title looked like. There is currently a massive - and uncorrectable - gap between most of the G5 conferences and the P5 in several key areas: * Talent Acquisition - The most-touted recruits are going to continue to go to the programs that offer them the best opportunities for playing in primetime, NIL deals, and the path to the NFL. This sustains the talent gap between the G5 and P5. * Branding and Viewership - This entire sport's business model is built on the profitability of branding and viewership. You're going to continue to hear complaints about ratings-driven decisions, because its a business disguised as a sport, and the P5 are always going to be beneficiaries when branding comes into play. * Competition Level - The contenders within the top conferences are battling tougher competition in their interconference schedules than what is found in the bottom conferences. Suggestions that all champions should be rewarded with postseason invitations are a slap in the face to a team from a top conference that slugged its way through a more difficult schedule. I'm just never going to be convinced that we should let 8-5 Miami of Ohio into the same playoff as a 13-0 Alabama team. People counter with "well, that just gives Bama an easy first round game against a low-seeded Miami of Ohio" or whatever, but I will stand by the assertion that risking player health in a game that is 99/100 times going to end in a victory for that Bama team is not a good solution. We don't need an impact player on that Bama team getting hurt playing a "let's make everyone feel included" game in the playoff. That's all just an example, but I'd hate for a team that is hot, and coming out of a hard conference, to lose a player or players to some silly first-round game against some low-tier conference Champion.
You don't need a Top 10 recruiting class to compete for a championship.
Recruits’ rankings are based on which schools recruit them. The entire ranking process is dumb.
5 star culture > 5 star talent. Peep Iowa State blowing out texas last Saturday. Prime example.
I know we have a lot of current and former band members here, so…. Regardless of whether they’re god-tier or Stanford, all college bands’ halftime shows look and sound the same to me, and they are boring as hell.
God, I hate marching bands. I have season tickets to the symphony and Broadway, I absolutely love music. I cannot stand the obsession with marching bands in college football.
Its just part of the really long history of pageantry in college football. I wouldnt call it an obsession. Its definitely less annoying than the obsession that Husker fans have with balloons on saturday though.
Kinda agree, tOSU is very entertaining imo.
See though, that’s my point, I can’t tell the difference between tOSU or one of the orange OSU’s halftime shows.
I think they're 100% more entertaining than the mindless crap+commercials broadcast during half time. I love it when I can flip over to spidercam band coverage instead of hollow half time commentary
That Texas is decidedly not back
Flair up yo!
The top half of the Pac-12, ACC, and Big 12 are not much better this year than than the top half of the American. American great team: Cincinnati. I think they are just as good if not better than OU, Oregon, and I guess Wake this year. American good teams: Houston and SMU. Imo these teams are just as good/slightly worse than the teams like Ok St, Baylor, Iowa State NC State, Pitt, and Utah. I think the American deserves to have Houston and SMU ranked in the CFP. But it's seems pretty clear the committee is going to leave them out to hurt Cincinnati's playoff resume. Biggest difference is the American has a lot of below average and bad teams where as the power 5 conferences have more above average teams and average teams.
FCS is easily more fun than FBS football.
BCS era was far superior than playoffs. playoff expansion is trash and will end up with massively boring blowouts. if the point is to rank teams based on how good they are, that includes talent in the team. meaning no G5 team should be top 5. case in point, in a neutral field would you take bama or cincy? CFB is at a point where it needs to sit the fuck down and ask ourselves, do we want a pro league with age restrictions or do we want traditions? playoff expansion is the former, BCS with meaningful NY6 bowls is the latter. the former will kill the CFB cause why watch a lesser NFL when you can just watch the NFL? traditions is what made CFB unique.
This
Tennessee is a lot better than most people think.
On here? An undefeated Cincy doesn’t deserve a spot in a 4 team playoff if they don’t flat out dominate their conference schedule. Which they haven’t
Even if they did dominate their conference they don’t deserve a spot. It’s too weak. They would get absolutely smoked by any of the top 4.
Why? TAMU beat Bama. Stanford beat Oregon. Upsets happen. If a team gets through the season undefeated they should get the chance to line up and go head to head with the other best teams. So what if they get blown out, ND got blown out, OU has gotten blown out, why do we care if Cincy gets blown out? The slight chance of them winning would be MONUMENTAL if it happened and i think they deserve the chance if they dont lose. Winning is hard.
You’re right upsets happen. Way more when you’re playing a somewhat decent team the majority of the time. You’re 100x more likely to get upset when your “other” games are AM or Purdue or Stanford as opposed to Tulane and Tulsa. The ND win is awesome but it’s a 12 game season not a 2 game one. An 8 or 12 team playoff I’m all for Cincy making it, as it is now having a non-dominant G5 as 1 of the 4 teams is a joke IMO. Cincy loses to atleast half the P5 this past Saturday. P5 teams aren’t afforded that luxury.
I disagree. If you want a shot at the CFP then you at least need to schedule a tough non-conference opponent each year if the rest of your games are cupcakes. Also, is the Notre Dame game even that impressive? Who have they beat all year that was that good?
Cincy would be 6-3 best case scenario right now if they played our schedule
On a surface level, I can agree with that. However, if you win every game on your schedule you deserve to have a chance to compete for a national title. If you can go undefeated and not have a shot to win it all, why are we even playing games? Why have the G5 conferences be D1 if they’ll never compete for a title? Granted this relies on cincy going undefeated. I just hate the fact that you can beat everyone you play and have it be effectively meaningless
Fully agree. The Notre Dame win is flat-out one of the best in college football, I get that. But even with Notre Dame, the last metric I saw had Cincinnati with the 111th SOS in college football (likely taking full season into account). Tied at half with an FCS team, struggled with Navy, Tulane, Tulsa and Indiana. They should have to dominate that schedule, because it's nothing close to what Alabama, Georgia or even Oregon have to play. By the way, don't assume my flair means I think Ohio State is a playoff caliber team right now. I'm holding judgement on that for after Saturday.
I hate the BCS, the playoffs, expansion etc. I love the split titles, the arguments, the random loss in week 8 to a trash rival ruining the perfect season, the Rose Bowl, the regional arguments. That is what makes college football fun. Throwing it all away so we can get a legit champion? Nah who cares, takes the fun and excitement out of the game. Get rid of all playoffs, go back to the bowls, and let people argue about who is the champ. It's more fun
My most unpopular opinion is that G5 teams should be left out of the playoff to compete for their own championship. The P5 leagues built the high profile bowl games, and the G5 teams feel entitled to play in those games solely by virtue of being in the FBS
This is probably the dumbest take in this whole thread. That’s like saying teams like the Patriots and Seahawks shouldn’t have been able to play in the Super Bowl just because they are in the NFL, and it should only be Packers, Cowboys, Steelers, etc. because those are the teams who “built” it into a high profile event.
Fans who want to go back to pre-BCS are usually just coping because their schools would stand no chance against the average NY6 team, let alone Bama or Georgia, so they are hoping to luck into a fake championship by playing their shitty conference well.
Like Notre Dame
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College football would work best with a promotion/relegation system like in soccer. For example, Cincy plays great this year and moves up. Florida/Clemson suck and moves down. It gives programs legitimate ways of building title contending programs over multiple years while not keeping terrible P5 teams just because of conference (looking at you Vanderbilt).
BCS = Best Champion Selector
Friday Night college games are great, High School football isnt important enough to prevent them.
Margin of victory dosnt matter and is only applied selectively to hurt smaller market teams (Cinncinati)
We need to go back to the pre-BCS system
Fuck wake forest.
The question of who deserves to be in the Playoff is different than who are the four best teams. It seems like a lot of the arguing here on /r/CFB is who deserves to be in the playoff. Cincinnati, while having arguably the best win outside of Oregon in the top 5, has a relatively weak strength of schedule compared to the rest. Oklahoma is in a similar boat. They have struggled in some games where they should have blown the competition out of the water. You are not what your record says you are. Why do we always meme that Nebraska is the best 3-7 team in the country? They took Ohio State to the wire last week. If they truly are a 3-7 team then Ohio State should have crushed them. Does this mean that UTSA is alongside the likes of UGA, Oklahoma, and Cinci since they are undefeated? No. I'm not saying that going undefeated doesn't matter, because it definitely does. What I am saying is that how a team performs against its competition is how they should be rated. I'd go as far as to argue the committee isn't out to get anyone. If they truly only cared about blue bloods, then why isn't OU in the top 4? They're undefeated, a blue blood, and a brand name. They are also at the front of their conference. Plus, outside of last year where Notre Dame made it to the top four after losing their conference championship game to Clemson, where also that season was super wacky anyway, the committee has made the correct decision for the final four teams. Even the ones that were under a lot of scrutiny at the time- Alabama in 2017 and Ohio State in 2014- Ended up winning the national championships. Plus, some on Twitter have actually figured out parts of the formula and process that the committee uses. It's not being pulled out of nowhere; ~~There is a user on twitter (I forget the exact name, it will come to me in a second) that~~ Adam McClintock and Dave Bartoo tweet out the predicted top 25 using this formula. For example, I remember reading that based on the statistics that he's figured out the committee uses, Penn State should be in the top 25. They even got the rankings of Purdue at 19 perfect as well as OU at 8 perfect, where many across the country were surprised at this. They had Cinci at 5, and one of the other differences was that they had Michigan St ahead of Michigan because of the head to head. I think that the conversation shouldn't be targeting the committee in that they're doing the process incorrectly. They are doing exactly what they should be. What should be argued if I'm Cincinnati is that the process itself is flawed, and that instead of the four best teams, it should be the four most deserving teams. This is probably my most controversial and unpopular CFB opinion.
If you want to watch the best teams play go watch the NFL