Dumping Them Out: Are Playoffs Bad?

Welcome back to very very extra special Christmas Jewish holiday edition of Dumping Them Out. Where we reflect on the best Boob GIF's that I personally sourced for you every Sunday of 2024, except for in November when I was recovering from a nasty case of alcoholism. Will your favorite Boob GIF make the cut? The votes have officially been tallied. You'll have to quickly scroll to the bottom of the page before your computer explodes from pop-up ads to find out. 

I should really stop making fun of our pop-up ads that everyone hates, because I'm confident they're the only thing that makes me even slightly monetizable as an employee.

I almost forgot to write this blog today. Nearly forgot it was Sunday. My schedule is off because Barstool Sports gets a winter break to match our company's mean 8th grade reading level. So once break hits days become meaningless for the next week and a half. Yesterday I made the 8-hour drive home in a rental car with 4 pets and 1 woman. I thought I had made a terrible mistake driving home during the first round of the college football playoff. Turns out it was brilliant. From what I gather on Twitter, everybody who spent all day yesterday watching college football had a horrible time. They hated every minute of it. Would have rather been dead. Clearly the 12-team playoff was a grave mistake and we need to immediately cut it down to 8 to assure we'll never be forced to sit through a bad postseason football game again. 

I swear College Football is the only sport where people make such definitive judgments based on such a small sample size. The 3-loss SEC teams threw a hypothetical parade because the results of 2 games (Indiana & SMU) definitively proved they belonged in the playoff. But after Ohio State destroyed Tennessee, Lane Kiffin and Paul Finebaum fell radio silent, and suddenly the 3-loss teams SEC teams are shit, their whole conference is shit, and the internet has the right to clown them because they lost the most recent game.

Big T might be right in the long run, but "proving" is such an insane word to use after 2 games of the first round of the first ever 12-team playoff. I know this isn't a science experiment. But you have to gather more data than that before you can "prove" anything. I would have used the word "implied" or perhaps, "suggests".

It's insane how much weight individual games hold in college football. Tennessee comes out with one terrible performance and people take it to mean so much. We don't do that in any other sport. There's no, "Well they just had a bad night" in college football. If you fuck up once, that's what you are. It's also what your entire conference is, along with every team you played that season.

At least with Indiana people have multiple games to point at. But I think someday we'll look back on 2024 Indiana as maybe the biggest anomaly of a college football team we've ever seen. Not only did their Big Ten schedule fall in an almost impossibly easy way, where last year's national championship teams completely fell off a cliff. But for Indiana to be able to blow out as many mediocre Big Ten teams as badly as they did, then look so embarrassingly inept against top tier teams. I don't know if any team is going to fit that mold again. It was bizarre. I bet if Indiana had beaten a couple of those teams, say Maryland & Washington, by one score or less. Or if a couple more of those games were even competitive in the 4th quarter, the committee wouldn't have let them in. But they had all those blowouts so their hands were tied. Then Indiana (and SMU) got fucking smoked, and probably ruined the playoff chances of 1-loss teams with weak schedules for the rest of time.

Mostly I just don't understand how people can be so confident after one year of shitty 1st round playoff games, that if we change up the format it's not going to result in an entirely new set of problems. Like people haven't been mad about every set of college football rankings ever released since the invention of rankings. If they wanna get rid of automatic byes for next season, that makes sense. I like it strictly for selfish "I'm annoyed by the SEC" reasons. But Texas having to win a game to earn the chance to be 14-point favorites vs Arizona State is objective nonsense.

Also, it's nuts how college football is at a point where the playoff committee is judged on how entertaining the playoff games are. 

On a macro-level that seems so broken to me. But I guess that's just college sports. You'll never have an objectively correct way to determine which teams are most deserving of the playoffs. So when a team doesn't show up for their playoff game, the first couple teams left out will always claim that they would've given fans a better product. Which is what neutral fans want more than anything. And since college football seems so willing to drastically change things up every year, people actually have a reason to go to war and demand action based on what they want because they'll probably be able to cyberbully college football into listening to them. It's kinda how we got the playoffs in the first place. 

That's it. Merry Holidays.