Diego Blunt said:
can somebody please explain how exactly the conferences, divisions and bowls all work ??? i've only been following 'football' (gridiron to me) for a little while and am confused as fuck ...
for exactly that reason, i'll throw a spanner in the works and say that they should change to a playoff-style championship ...
what does everyone here think re: playoffs versus bowl system ???
clearly i know nothing and don't care too much, but wanted to try promote more discussion than just:
"Go Team X!" - as the latter will probably not inspire the powers that be to add a sports and gaming forum to this site ...
Well most teams belong to a conference, unlike professional sports the teams/conferences get to choose where they go (teams must be invited by the conference though, not everyone can be in one conference) for example Florida, my team is in the SEC, Mich and OSU are both in the big 10, however Notre Dame still refuses to join a conference largely for monetary reasons (conferences share money and such, so the richer teams give a share of their proceeds to the lesser football programs within their own conference).
As for bowls, each bowl game has tie ins with either a team or a conference, the Aloha bowl always has an open invitation to Hawaii assuming they're bowl elgible (.500+ winning percentage), and the Rose bowl is always the winner of the Pac-10 conference vs the winner of the Big 10 conference (unless the winner of one of those goes to the National championship game as in this year). Same thing with other bowls, winner of SEC goes to Sugar Bowl, 5th in SEC goes to Peach bowl, and many many other tie ins to guarantee conferences teams in bowl games. Sometimes the bids are at-large, meaning the bowl comittee can invite whoever they want to their bowl, in the end it's up to the team to decide whether to accept a bid to a certain bowl. The big bowls are the so-called "BCS Bowls", being the sugar, rose, fiesta and orange. These are the ones giving the big $$, something like $14 million per school. Ad revenue among these and all bowls is huge, virtually all have named sponsors (Tostitos Fiesta bowl, Nokia Sugar bowl, Outback bowl, etc.).
Money is the end reason that a playoff system hasn't formed yet, especially due to the worry among the smaller, lesser football schools that they will be left out and the ad money for small bowls simply wont be there, and all people will care about is the playoff. As a die-hard college football fan I will always be pulling for a playoff system to be instituted, and I think eventually it will be but not for a decade or so unfortunately. It's really the fairest way to do it, and I'm not worried about the monetary effects as my school is one of the powerhouses, and will come out on top no matter what system is instituted.
