re: Kirk Herbstreit worried for college football: "What the hell is happening to our sport?"

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People focus on the playoffs more because more teams have a legitimate shot.

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Do they? this will the 7th year of the playoff. The teams ranked 1 and 3 currently have been in 5 of the previous 6, 5 consecutive title games and played each other 4 times including 3 title games.

in the first 6 years of the BCS 8 teams played in the BCS CG, with 6 different winners. the first 6 of the playoff has had 6 teams play for the title and 4 winners and i think only 11 teams have made the playoff

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Playoff system sucks and rewards the top 4 or 5 teams. Parity basically disappeared overnight

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As opposed to only the top two teams the rest of college football’s history?

Things changed the bigger the money got in the NFL and in college football

Only way to stop this is to make college athletes contract employees

This very rich coming from Kirk.

We’ve put athletes on a pedestal. It’s been happening for years, but pro salaries have spiraled out of control. Yes, the guy are getting ‘market value’ and enjoying capitalism, but it shows how skewed our societal values are when Lebron inks a 2 year extension for $85 million, but protesters want to defund police officers who literally risk their lives.

That thought process has filtered down through media, and we now have HS kids gaining hundreds of twitter followers who eagerly await when they announce their final four schools.

We are all part of THAT problem in a sense.

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Conference championships aren’t big deals now? That isn’t the goal of every team entering the season?

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I don’t mean this is a shot at Bama, but the Tide has claimed nattys without winning their own division.

Let’s not pretend these conference titles mean a lot.

Another blow to those was struck when Penn State won the Big Ten, while Ohio State sat home and learned of their advancement to the CFP.

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To remedy these issues, I would allow players to make money in college by profiting off of their own name, image and likeness. If you still think college football is all about amateurism these days, especially at big programs, I don't know

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Will only make it worse.

Let’s say you have an High End Booster that is currently helping out the football program at school via purely honest means - buying expensive suites, making huge donations for new facilities, volunteering all of the resources to help above the board. Let’s say they are spending anywhere between 500k and a million in a given year, not including those huge donations every few years for new/upgraded facilities. The whole reason why he throws that extra money in the pot beyond suite costs is to help entice recruits to come to your school. Well now players can be paid to endorse products and do advertisements. Why donate that money to do facilities when I can just outright pay the top guys to come to my school? Not every recruit is a highly sought after national recruit. I’m not going to throw a $50k ad offer to a recruit whose scholarship offer list is whatever P5 school HEB supports and a bunch of middling G5 schools.

That will create a divide in the locker room as well, especially when you have mix of 4-6 high end national recruits and 15 or so guys who regional/state level recruits. And what’s the promise you’ll make to a 5-star guy? Are you paying them just to sign? Are you telling them I’ll pay you after you sign and prove yourself? What if you sign a 5-star linebacker under the promise you’ll pay him when he makes an all-freshman/all-conference team and through his first two seasons, he only plays sparingly here and there? Does he bail? What other school’s HEB is going to pay you, especially if you shunned their offer on the initial go around?

It’s a huge clusterfrick that creates exponentially more problems than it solves all because liberals have some bullshite need for “fair”. The fair comes around every fall, get your elephant ear and foot long corn dog then and leave college football alone.

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Think of it this way:

You have five major conference champs each year. In the BCS era, most of those teams aren’t going to play for the NC.

Now, most of them will.

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I’m genuinely not trying to be dense.

I don’t know what your point is here.

I don’t disagree that the passion or whatever it is has changed. But I don’t think have a 4 team playoff has anything to do with it.

Take the bowls away from the playoffs.
And the media should cover who is in position to make them just as passionately as they cover the teams with a chance to make the playoff.

Not only do I think it would fix the problem, I think it would make that new era of CFB amazing.

And stop being a damn playoff for player opting out. It has nothing to do with that. The playoff simply KEEPS MORE kids for opting out that otherwise would in this new era of get my money attitude.

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those days are over, not to sound like a broken record, but it is the sports culture. We judge everything on rings and that's it.

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I really think we could get it back

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"I’m worried about the sport overall," he said. "I’m worried about the focus strictly on the playoff, that if you’re not one of the playoff teams, 'Why does it even matter, who cares? Let’s just opt out, let’s get ready for the NFL.'"

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Spot on.



Is this actually an argument for expanding the playoffs?

Or does expanding the playoffs just shuffle this down the tiers a bit and now even more teams are "playoffs or bust" than before?