tromeros@unm.edu
On July 3, college football changed forever.
Twelve university presidents approved a plan put forward by 11 conference presidents and Notre Dame’s athletic commissioner for a 12-year deal to institute a four-team playoff system beginning in 2014. This comes not as a shock, but a much-needed change to the most popular college sport.
For years, the little guys from the nonautomatic qualifying conferences, such as Boise State, TCU, Utah and other schools, received the short end of the stick when it came down to who was going to the BCS bowls and/or the national championship game.
With the new playoff system in place, the underdogs finally have a shot at capturing a national title instead of various bowl championships that mean little to nothing.
But is that the truth? Do conferences such as the Mountain West, Sun Belt and the Western Athletic have as good a chance as the Big 12, Pac-12 and Big Ten?
With the automatic-qualifier nonsense out of the way, it looks like teams will be picked for their performance on the field and not because they happen to play in the Southeastern Conference.
Still, how will the rankings be decided?
Instead of polls from writers, coaches and computers, as in the old BCS, a committee will decide who gets to play for the national championship. How this committee will be chosen remains to be seen, but hopefully the members are knowledgeable and have enough time on their hands to evaluate each team equally and fairly.
According to ESPN, the criteria for being eligible to make it to the playoff might be the following: 1) win-loss record, 2) strength of schedule, 3) head-to-head results, 4) whether a team is a conference champion.
If these are the criteria, weaker conferences such as the MWC won’t have a shot because of the lack of competition inside it.
It’s hard to imagine any scenario in which a team from the lower rungs makes it to the playoff at all. If teams want a chance to make it to the show, they have to move to high-tier conferences.
Prime examples of this are Boise State, TCU and Utah. All three schools are planning to or already have moved from the MWC to greener pastures. The Broncos are leaving to the Big East next season, the Horned Frogs left to the Big 12 this year and the Utes went to the Pac-12 in 2011.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
This means MWC teams have no shot at making it to the big dance unless a team puts together a tough nonconference schedule and the competition inside the conference itself becomes insanely tough.
Besides, if a team from an easier conference goes undefeated or has a good case to go to the playoff, the committee will probably just stick it into one of the BCS bowls and be done with it.
In the end, the playoffs make fans happy and give the weaker conferences a false sense of hope that maybe one day UNM or Nevada will be challenging the big boys for the right to become the best in college football. But in reality, it is more or less a pipe dream.
The playoffs may satisfy most fans, but once again the mid-major conferences are the ones left out of the picture.
