As succinctly as I can:
College football traditionally has had a lot going on beyond the season-ending battle for who is the single overall champion, unique among sports in America. So much so obviously that sometimes that "national champion" remained undecided. It created a thicker and weirder sport and culture that in my view is responsible for it having such a huge and passionate following above and beyond any other sport on the planet that isn't the top competitive level in that sport.
That's a negative to me, I like knowing that the trophy was one on the field, not handed out by the media. I also don't think that's what creates such a huge following for D1 FB.
This playoff is, in my view, going to centralize all of the interest in the sport toward the handful of games and teams that are playing the games that actually have leverage over the newly all-important quest for the national championship. These games will mostly be played at neutral sites, not on campus, not during the school year, and apparently not even affiliated with the traditional bowls.
I don't understand this paragraph at all, which is probably why I don't follow your premise that playoffs are bad, mmkay? The regular season still happens--in fact it HAS to happen in order to get to the playoffs. Conference games, tailgating, marching bands, cheerleaders, crisp fall weather, none of that goes away. As far as the traditional bowls--align the New Year's bowls with quarter/semi-final playoff games. The traditional conference affiliations for those have already been broken, yet I still watch, because I want to see good football.
This will maximize the dollars flowing out of the wallets of already-committed Alabama and Clemson and Ohio State fans, of which there are many, over the coming seasons. But this is, in my view, going to be a profoundly less interesting product that will first cause all but the handful of elite programs to wither on the vine, and then even those big fanbases start to taper as people who remember the aesthetic meaning of student sections and rivalry trophies and leafy fall Saturdays get older and older, similar to what is happening in baseball.
I don't see how you got here. See my paragraph above, college football is still college football. Each team is still going to play a dozen or so regular season games with rivalry trophies, student sections, etc. Illinois fans will still pack MS, Wisky fans will still flock to Camp Randall, fans will still walk The Grove in Oxford MS because they want to watch the games and enjoy the tradition associated with those games. Your argument makes it seem like our attendance should have been zero during the Beckman and Smith years, yet people still bought season tickets and went to the games, knowing full well the Illini were unlikely to play past the Saturday after Thanksgiving. They still tailgated, went to Grange Grove, the band played, the card section still did their routines, and the cheerleaders still did pushups in the end zones, because Those.Games.Matter.
College football built a behemoth doing things one way, and now they are going to extract the profits from that success doing things in a different way which will leave nothing but an empty, passionless husk behind.
I really think you underestimate football fans. If this were true, the Cleveland Browns would have no fanbase, yet their fanbase is one of the most unique (and delusional) in all of sport. Sports fans are tribal, they attach to their tribe and they stick there, for the most part, through thick and thin. Look at the Browns, the Cubs, the Nets, the Duke football program, and the beloved Fighting Illini.
I'm happy to have everyone think I'm wrong and an idiot, but I don't want to be unclear about what I'm saying, does that make it clear for you?
It's clear, and I appreciate you laying it out. I don't think you're an idiot, but I do thinking you're making some incorrect assumptions about fan bases that cause your overall position to be flawed. I personally believe that minimizing the SEC's leverage (along with that of Texas and Notre Dame individually) is good for CFB, and that the next logical step is a playoff system of at least 16 teams, which IMO goes further to level the playing field, rather than tilting it in favor of the programs we see in the playoffs year after year, ultimately resulting an a B1G team getting whupped by an SEC team. That might still happen, but at least more teams have a shot.
