So, yeah. A national playoff works better for me.
But see the Los Angeles Times, "College football's breakout performance":
The show Monday night was forecast to draw the largest audience in cable television history. A 30-second advertising spot was going for as much $1 million.
The cause of all this attention: the first-ever College Football Playoff championship game.
Ohio State upset Oregon, 42-20, before 85,639 fans in a game that failed to follow anything resembling the anticipated script. The champion Buckeyes were the last team to earn a spot in the four-team playoff field, and they fell behind almost immediately as high-powered Oregon bolted 75 yards in 11 plays for a touchdown the first time they had the ball.
In the end, however, it was Ohio State celebrating on the field amid a shower of confetti, the first champions of a new era in college football.
The championship, at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, the most modern and palatial of professional football venues, concluded one of the most scrutinized seasons in history. It was the first time that a major college football championship was settled by a playoff.
On New Year's Day, semifinal matches between Ohio State and Alabama in the Sugar Bowl and Oregon and Florida State in the Rose Bowl, like Monday's game on ESPN, each drew record cable audiences of more than 28 million.
The game capped a season in which an already popular sport enjoyed a renaissance, scaling new heights in fan interest and flexing ever-building financial clout.
The playoff at least temporarily settled a rocky championship history that spanned decades.
For many years, teams from college football's highest competition level were awarded national titles in votes by associations of reporters and coaches. Then came the Bowl Championship Series, a 16-year era in which computer data were added to voting tabulations in a vexing formula that resulted in the two highest-rated teams at the end of the regular season meeting in a winner-takes-all final game.
It was a controversial — and, it turns out, flawed — system. Had the BCS been used this season, Alabama and Florida State would have been the top-ranked teams and met in the title game. Instead, they lost in the semifinal round.
This season, the final four teams were selected by a 12-member committee of college officials and other dignitaries — former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice among them — who met weekly near Dallas and, beginning in the ninth week of the season, issued a weekly top-25 ranking.
"The anticipation of the weekly rankings, the crescendo that built … is something I hadn't seen in my experience," said Pat Haden, a committee member who played quarterback at USC, was a broadcaster for Notre Dame and is currently USC's athletic director.
The new system, like the old, has stirred debate — right from the start. College football's top teams are spread over five "power conferences," and with only four semifinal spots available, at least one champion is always going to be left out.
This season, Texas Christian and Baylor, co-champions of the Big 12 Conference, were the odd teams out. It was particularly disappointing for TCU, which was No. 3 in the next-to-last ranking but was jumped by Florida State, Ohio State and Baylor on the final list even after a 52-point win in its last regular-season game.
"No matter what the system, the teams that finished outside the cutline are going to feel they were treated unfairly," Haden said. "No system, even this one, is going to be without critics."...
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