Yeah, for some reason Barack Obama sounded off on the “NCAA Football Playoff System” topic during an interview on 60 minutes last month as our country was on the brink of falling apart.  It was weird.  I think he was trying to be funny.

Regardless, as every college football fan has discussed at one point in their life, there should undoubtedly be a NCAA football playoff.  Some people argue for 8 teams, 16 teams, or some sort of variation.

Here are my reasons for a 16 team playoff system…

1) Nobody cares about non-conference games.  Non-conference games suck.  Cut all 4 of them out of the schedule and start the season off with OVERLY worthwhile conference games.  Without being said, your team better be ready to play on week 1!

2) Nobody cares about bowl games (anymore) unless your team is playing in one.  For example, this year I slept through the Rose Bowl because it was a blowout, went shopping during the Cotton Bowl even though it was a close game because – ranking wise – it didn’t really matter what team won, and am blogging during the Sugar Bowl because I could care less about either Utah or Alabama and they can’t finish #1.

3) A 16 team playoff system would make the NCAA so much money it’s sick.  Just like March Madness, some network will drop some major $ on the exclusive tournament rights.   In fact, I’ll guess that a network would drop way more money than the networks dish out to cover the current BCS bowls.  Each of the 8 tournament games can keep their bowl games (and destinations?) in the event the NCAA wanted to keep corporate sponsors.  For example, the 1 vs. 16 match-up could be the Gaylord Hotels Bowl and/or the 2 vs. 15 match-up could be the Outback Bowl.  As the playoff boils down, the NCAA would still maintain their major bowls like the Rose, Fiesta, Sugar, Orange and keep their lame sponsors.

4) Every single year since its inception in 1998, it seems that the BCS system screws some team HARDCORE – sans rubber.  This year, USC, Utah, and Texas got screwed.

5) There isn’t a single football fan that likes the BCS system.

So, a 16 team postseason tournament.  This would make for 9 conference games, 1 bye, and NO non-conference games.  The top team from each of the 11 conferences and the top 5 other teams (as voted upon by a committee) would be invited to participate in the tournament.  I guarantee that such a playoff system would have almost every single college football fan tuning into each of the 15 games over 4 weeks.  RATINGS!

Unless I’m missing something, a NCAA football playoff system should be in place as early as next year.  As baffling as it was that my grandparents didn’t have running water growing up, I think my children and grandchildren will wonder why the NCAA screwed the pooch so horribly with the current BCS system.

Thoughts?

Update: Here’s something from last year that I seemingly copied and pasted sections from.  Ha!

http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/football/news?slug=dw-playoff112707&prov=yhoo&type=lgns

1) Join at least one social networking site per month.  Radar.net is up next and then after I figure out how to jailbreak (wtf?) my iPhone “properly,” I’ll be on Qik.com.  Send some suggestions outside of facebook, myspace, linkedin, twitter, digg, etc.

2) Ban smoking.  Unoriginal yet horribly ineffective over the years.

3) Keep posting at least 1 blog entry per day unless I go on another honeymoon in an area where there are days upon days of no internet access or Tim Russert dies again.  Should he, take a one day break.

4) By the end of the year, find something other than technology, politics, and the economy to become fixated with.

Happy New Year…

ALERT: Wrigley Field is quickly and awkwardly becoming a hockey shrine.

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/12/30/is-this-where-the-700-billion-is-going

I knew the $700 billion was going to something special.  Good to see the pricing error was corrected. How was this thing in stock?

I gotta stop watching cable television “news” before 7 am.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zbigniew_Brzezinski

The Doc may be boring as hell, but, he makes Joe Scarborough look like a biatch on his own show when he refers to Joe as “stunningly superficial.”  Check out the video and try to stay awake as the verbal exchange gets good about halfway through this clip…

Vodpod videos no longer available.

P.S.  If there’s no clip displayed above, give it 30-60 seconds to load.

Answer: My dick.

This was deemed an unacceptable answer. I didn’t know eHarmony screened candidates so thoroughly. I guess this guy thought honesty was a virtue.  What a pig – ha!

Jason, thank you.

From October 3, 2008…

http://valleywag.gawker.com/5058760/valleywag-cuts-60-percent-of-staff

The above link is directly from Gawker.  It’s the full email Nick Denton sent to the editorial team.

Below is what was printed in Inc. Magazine in their December 2008 issue but I can’t find it anywhere on Inc.com.  I haven’t searched that hard.

Weird that Nick Denton’s layoff email didn’t post (or break) anywhere quicker online outside of Gawker.com, eh?

“I have some bad news. Here’s the heart of it: we are cutting 19 of our 133 editorial positions and suspending bonus payments at the start of next year… I could come up with some bullshit line about how much worse it would have been to wait until we were forced to control costs…I could give you my optimistic spin about the glorious future that awaits us on the far side of this downturn. But there is no escaping the fact that we’re losing some excellent colleagues and the environment next year will be bleak. The one consolation is that there will be plenty of news for us to break — starting with this email, which you are free to leak.”

Seems like a pretty unnecessarily bleak outlook.   Maybe online advertisers should reach out to someone and figure out how to make money.  You can only make money by showing ROI.  Emails are pretty simple to send.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/26/sports/ncaafootball/26recruit.html?_r=4&pagewanted=all

Should my son somehow be talented enough to play for a major college program – ha! – I am so sending him to the University of Texas.  Seems like a class act football program:

But the best summation of his experience might have come from a paper he wrote for his English class comparing Oklahoma and Texas. The paper, “Red River Rivals Recruit,” includes a description of a wild party hosted by Longhorns fans at an upscale hotel in Dallas after the Oklahoma-Texas game on Oct. 11.

“I will never forget the excitement amongst all participants,” McFarland wrote. “Alcohol was all you can drink, money was not an option. Girls were acting wild by taking off their tops, and pulling down their pants. Girls were also romancing each other. Some guys loved every minute of the freakiness some girls demonstrated. I have never attended a party of this magnitude.”

He continued: “The attitude of the people at the party was that everyone should drink or not come to the party. Drugs were prevalent with no price attached.”

He compared that with a house party hosted by a sorority at Oklahoma.

“Drinks were plentiful, but not to the extent they were” at the Dallas party, he wrote. “Some people were tipsy, but in control of themselves.”

Circa 1980’s. Elitist?!? Good article I found after visiting the location…

http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/30/where-obama-lived-in-1980s-new-york/

iPhone photo from December 26, 2008…

…to all the atheists out there that love opening presents.

Rebuilding year. Ahahahaha.

I don’t remember a key play at u of m during the 2008 season but I could be wrong. I think this guy (and a few of the other fans) were simply excited to show keys to the photographer.

Packing sure is boring.