Tonight's national championship game between Oregon and Ohio State is being touted variously as the first true national championship game and the result of the first true playoff in big-time college football.
That is definitely true.
On Planet Imadope.
Division 1A college football has had a playoff, also known as the BCS, for 15 years. It has produced a true national championship every single year since 1998.
The only difference between a two-team playoff and a four-team playoff is the number of teams. In either case, someone had to decide, subjectively, which teams to allow into the playoff. That would be true even if they conducted a 64-team playoff. Someone would have to decide which team was 65th best and thus not qualified to play on.
In fact, we have just that system in college basketball. Currently, 68 teams crowd into the field, yet we hear the same ulcerative wailing about teams #69, 70 and 71 being short-changed.
So it's a semantic difference, right? Sure, in a system where a league with 16 teams is called the Big Ten, a league with 10 teams is called the Big 12, a league called the Big East includes schools from Omaha and Indianapolis, and pre-professionals expected to work hard in their jobs representing their billion-dollar institutions are called amateurs, the 16th version of something can be called the first.
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