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Recapping the new College Football Playoff Apocalypse News, Links, and Stories; Go Buffs
Stay safe in-state Colorado fans; and if you are reading The Ralphie Report and you can see a wildfire, then PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF GOD CLICK ONE OF THE ADS BEFORE YOU EVACUATE. Seriously though, stay not-on-fire: CDEM Map of Colorado Fires
Presidents approve college football playoff - Buffzone - Let's start with the facts and go from there
College football fans have been clamoring for a playoff for years, and the BCS has been a constant target for criticism. Lawmakers have railed against it. A political action committee was formed, dedicated to its destruction. The Justice Department looked into whether it broke antitrust laws. Even President Obama said he wanted a playoff.
Now it's a reality. No. 1 will play No. 4, and No. 2 will play No. 3 on Dec. 31 and Jan. 1.
The sites of those games will rotate among the four current BCS bowls -- Rose, Orange, Fiesta and Sugar -- and two more to be determined. The winners will advance to the championship on the first Monday in January that is six or more days after the last semifinal. The first championship Monday is set for Jan. 12, 2015.
The site of the title game will move around the way the Super Bowl does, with cities bidding for the right to host. The teams will be selected by a committee, similar to the way the NCAA basketball tournament field is set. The men's tournament has 68 teams, and 37 at-large bids. The football committee will have a much tougher task, trying to whittle the field down to four.
College football -- Time to celebrate the approval of a four-team playoff - ESPN
Presenting the five greatest documents in American history: 1. The Declaration of Independence. 2. The United States Constitution. 3. The Bill of Rights. 4. The 14th Amendment. 5. The just-announced college football playoff agreement.
I know what you're thinking: This is ridiculous. Why is the new 12-year playoff agreement ranked so low? This is a momentous day in the history of college football. And thanks to Tuesday's final ratifying vote by the BCS Presidential Oversight Committee, a manageable, logical and lonnnnnnnng overdue playoff system makes the traveling squad in 2014.
So if, say, Georgia, or Ohio State, or Texas, or Notre Dame are left on the No. 5 playoff bubble, then no whining allowed by the SEC's Mike Slive, the Big Ten's Jim Delany, the Big 12's Bob Bowlsby, Notre Dame's Swarbrick -- or any of the commissioners, for that matter.
Either you trust the new and improved selection mechanism, or you don't. Either you can live with a Final Four or not. Is the playoff system completely fair? No, but it's less unfair than the system it replaces. Notre Dame is always going to have certain inherent football advantages over other programs. Major conferences such as the Pac-12 are going to have certain advantages over, say, Conference USA. I'm a longtime SEC honk, but let's face it, it's a home game for LSU to play for a national championship in the Sugar Bowl.
So I've got zero problem if St. Louis, Indianapolis, Detroit, Houston or Dallas, among others, end up as hosts of a title game. And how can you not love the idea of college football planting a flag in the first or second week of January and delivering national semis in primetime, as well as the other heavy-hitter bowl games? Answer: you can't.
This is as sycophantic and uninformative a piece since I said that CU would win 8 games last season. Don't believe it. You can actually make arguments against a '4-seed playoff.' With a name like that, I just did.
The BCS finally has a stake driven through its heart, but the bowls and the big bucks still reign - Yahoo! Sports - As you might expect, Dan Wetzel has a dissenting view on the topic
Deep down, part of the appeal, or at least part of the deal, of being a college football fan is the corruption. You have to employ a situational moral sliding scale to fully embrace a sport where everyone gets paid but the players, and even a lot of those who eventually make NFL riches wind up broke because they didn't get much of an education.
You have to ignore the concussions and depressions. You have to pretend that the star tailback's aunt really could afford that tricked-out car he drives, the one conveniently registered in her name.
You have to believe that your school, and probably your school alone, and certainly not your archrival, does it the "right way" even if the right way was probably the University of Chicago, which gave up on the entire charade 70 years ago.
Now to find out how all this affects Colorado and the Pac-12...
What does a playoff mean for Pac-12? - Pac-12 Blog - ESPN
A college football playoff is at hand! Yippee! Well, it will be at hand in 2014. And, well, it's a Final Four, not really a full-on playoff. Think of it as a BCS times two, only with a selection committee that will choose the ... wait for it ... wait for it ... "FOUR BEST TEAMS."
You know: Just like the SEC wanted. Er, yippee?
So what does it mean for the Pac-12? The correct answer is we have no idea. Little is certain in college football these days. At least, other than the SEC winning BCS "national titles."
We don't yet know all the details of our shiny new playoff and we also have two more seasons to play before it takes effect, during which new variables are certain to be introduced. The suggested takeaway we have for you is cautious optimism. How revenue distribution works out also will be interesting to see.
How much will a conference get for putting two teams in a final four? And what does a conference get when it places no teams in the final four? A few consecutive seasons with one conference reaping monetary rewards from the former and another suffering through the latter could end up creating a sizable revenue disparity. And, perhaps, a new breed of have and have-nots.
Speaking of that: Are we certain that conference alignments will be as they are today in 2014? Probably not, right? Every time we feel like stability has arrived after an expansion frenzy, we only find out about more reckless eyeballing. At the very least, we are living through interesting times in college football. Just five or so years ago, these sort of cataclysmic changes didn't seem possible.
Rose Bowl, You Just Aren't The Same Anymore - Pacific Takes
The Rose Bowl as we know it is about to die and we're all going to die along with it. Well, okay, not that drastic. But things are going to be different in this new playoff format, and the Rose Bowl will be changing along with everything else.
I know most of you don't care, but plenty of Pac-12 fans want to know what things will be like for their holy grail of every college football season. After January 1, 2014 comes around, the Granddaddy of them all will just be like most of your granddaddies.
Endearing, nostalgaic, but archaic. Even though Pac-12 vs. Big Ten will be preserved and it'll still be the premier New Year's Bowl wedged in the late afternoon/early evening slot, it won't have quite the same significance as before. Here's how the new four-team college football playoff will be drawn up and how it affects the Rose Bowl.
1) If the Rose Bowl isn't a semifinal site, you can expect it to match up the Big Ten team and the Pac-12 team if it can at all costs. Expect there to be controversy every year of the playoff when the Rose Bowl has the semifinal and they end up with a borderline Big Ten/Pac-12 matchup, although there will probably be plenty of times this traditional matchup doesn't happen.
The BCS Presidential Oversight Committee will vote Tuesday in Washington, D.C., on a new four-team, three-game playoff that could be sold to television for as much as $5 billion over a 10-year deal, a BCS source close to the process told Sporting News. The 2011 BCS contract paid out $174 million, and the newly restructured postseason would nearly triple that number. Those numbers clearly outline why the committee won’t opt for a Plus One postseason—one game after all the bowl games are played—instead of the playoff proposed by the conference commissioners and Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbrick. "They’d be throwing away $2 1/2 billion—at least," one BCS source said.
Devil's Advocate: What Would've Been So Bad About A Plus-One Playoff? - SBNation.com
The plus-one game isn't going to be the playoff answer, much to the college football fan's delight. But what did we hate about the plus-one so much, anyway?
It wouldn't mean any less football -- it might even mean more. It would mean a far more legit No. 1-vs.-No. 2 championship than we've ever had. And it would completely preserve the entire bowl system, or at least the parts anybody cares about preserving. It would even make the bowls better all the way down by bumping out the two worst teams.
Just for the sake of understanding evil before we cast it out (I'm on your side!), let's look back at two things. First, what last year's bowl lineup could've looked like -- you'll note moving LSU and Alabama back into the bowl pool means no room for 6-6 Purdue and 6-7 UCLA (they might still make it in, due to a lack of eligible Pac-12 teams, but ain't nobody got time for that), along with no suspect BCS invite for Virginia Tech.
IOWA GETS THAT THROWBACK SPRINGSTEEN CORNPOOP FEELING - Every Day Should Be Saturday - A look at some black and gold throwback uniforms... for Iowa.
Iowa has throwback uniforms, and they have reduced us to fake constipated Springsteen lyrics from the random glory word production machine that writes all lyrics for bands that use the word "heartland" without being bitchy about it. Sing along with the "Ballad of Poopsmith Ferentz," or "The Cornin'," or "Tractor Sunset," and be sure to bear down hard like you're trying to crap out the ghost of Woody Guthrie and several well-encamped Rolling Stone writers all at once.
Colorado's prized pair of NCAA steeplechase champions, Emma Coburn and Shalaya Kipp, finished first and second, respectively, in their U.S. Olympic Trials qualifying heat here Monday and moved a step closer to the London Olympics. Running in a light rain at Hayward Field, Coburn posted the afternoon's fastest time (9:43.19) in the grueling 3,000-meter event to outpace Nike's Bridget Franek (9:44.05).
Kipp, running with Coburn in Heat 1, had the afternoon's fifth-fastest clocking (9:46.17). Monday's two qualifying heats advanced 14 runners to Friday's steeplechase finals. Neither CU student-athlete has participated in the Olympics, leaving the Buffs training partners anxious for the opportunity to earn a spot on Team USA. Said Coburn: "My teammate is my biggest competitor, but we're happy to be here and hope we can both make the team."
Without personally being in Colorado it's hard to evaluate the severity of the fires in the grand scheme of things. It looks pretty serious, but I've also been on the receiving end of needless-remote-hysteria-via-hurricane, so I know how it can be when someone on CSNBC makes a mountain out of your molehill.
So take the preface as what it's intended to be; an ardent wish for your safety...and your page-hits.
Stay safe, and Go Buffs.