quote:
Who cares about the importance of the regular season. Why are people worried about this, it’s not going to be an issue. Y’all going to suddenly care less about beating LSU, Auburn, and Tennessee? Just give us a serious way to determine a champion for once in this stupid sports history.

For 120 years, most true college football fans cared primarily about the regular season - beating traditional rivals was the primary goal along with winning as many games as possible with the reward being “going to a good bowl game”. In 1982 grocery stores in Baton Rouge sold out of oranges when the Tigers played FSU in November with the winner likely to get an invitation to the Orange Bowl. The scene was as exciting a game as ever happened in Tiger Stadium and there were zero thoughts of a “National Championship”.

And yes, you often had times where the Big 8 champion was in the orange bowl,
the SEC Champ in the sugar, the SWC in the cotton and the Big 10/Pac 10
Champs in the Rose, often meaning that 1-2-3 were in different bowls. And so they “decided”
who the champ was based on a popularity contest.

Now, we’ve gone to the other extreme. They are so worried with forcing a championship tournament on to a sport that, with 130 plus teams isn’t really fit for it, that they have essentially ruined what has made the sport great. The BCS was actually “ok” until they let politics play a role in it with the fiasco in 2011.
The four team playoff wasn’t bad - although again they turned out flawed events in 2014, 2017 and 2023 which in reality were no more “valid” than people simply voting would have been.

This 12 team football playoff will probably make a lot of money and get a lot of excitement from “sports fans”, but it does little for true college football fans.