College football playoffs

Introduction
Pros
- Pro 1: A post-season playoff leading up to the National Championship would replace the subjectivity of human and computer polls with the objective measure of winning or losing a game.
- Pro 2: A 2007 Gallup poll showed that 85% of college football fans supported a change to a playoff system of some kind.
- Pro 3: If a team loses one game it is probably out of contention for the National Championship; if it loses twice there is little chance the team will qualify for any BCS game.
- Pro 4: A playoff system would give each school an opportunity to earn a fair share of the revenue distributed to the 11 conferences in the FBS.
- Pro 5: The BCS human polls are subject to bias, which has been cited as one reason the University of Utah was kept out of the 2008 championship game.
- Pro 6: The BCS rewards undefeated BCS teams, so schools sometimes try to schedule games against weaker opponents to protect their records.
- Pro 7: A playoff system would not mean the end of the BCS rankings, which could still be used to determine the top 4, 8, 12, or 16 teams, depending on how many playoff games are feasible.
- Pro 8: The national champions in other major college sports are determined by playoff systems.
Cons
- Con 1: A playoff system would extend the 13 week regular season by at least a month, which would interfere with athletes’ college studies and which could potentially lead to more injuries from playing.
- Con 2: The BCS system makes every regular season game crucial for the teams in contention to finish in the top two.
- Con 3: Before 1998, bowl revenue was shared only by the conferences that had teams playing in the major bowl games, (2.3 MB) but the BCS changed the system to share the revenue with every conference.
- Con 4: The BCS rankings are designed to favor consistency over the course of the entire season.
- Con 5: The college football post-season bowl games are popular and profitable. Critics of BCS say that most people want a playoff system, but the bowl game attendance numbers contradict their argument.
- Con 6: The proposed playoff system alternatives are actually less fair than the BCS system in place.
- Con 7: The BCS conferences have stronger teams in them.
- Con 8: A playoff system would entail each team playing games in different cities during the holiday season in December and January, with no way to predict where any game besides the first one would take place.
Did you know?
Sources

References & Edit History Related Topics

Images

Close-up of an American football showing the textured brown leather surface, white laces, and a white stripe.

College football playoffs: Media

Should college football have a playoff system?

Images

Close-up of an American football showing the textured brown leather surface, white laces, and a white stripe.

Detail of a football.

Should college football replace the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) with a playoff...

© Yobro10/Dreamstime.com

VIEW MORE in these related Britannica articles: