Some of us watch the sport as intensely as Americans you know! There was turmoil a couple of years back when WBD, who took over a channel called BT Sport in the UK cancelled all NCAA programming. Luckily Sky Sports picked up 3 games a week. Only thing I don't worry about missing is Cowturd and Stephen A.
I was confused af even when I was living in the US. After I finally managed to understand how it works, I basically immediately started complaining about the selection committee's biases.
A tangential but relevant bit of history is that the NCAA did begin to organize a championship in football in 1978. But at that time, the big schools were satisfied with the bowl system, so they petitioned the NCAA for the right to opt out of the postseason championship - leading NCAA’s Division I to split into I-A and I-AA (the only sport where this is the case). The NCAA had predicted 65 of the 145 schools in the old Division I would join Division I-AA to compete for the championship. In fact, only 8 did (and 7 of those had joined Division I just one year earlier). Today, the divisions are known as the Football Bowl Subdivision and the Football Championship Subdivision, with the FCS consisting mostly of teams that have moved up from Division II. The College Football Playoff (which includes teams that are otherwise in the “Bowl Subdivision”) is not organized by the NCAA.
Definitely needs to be mentioned. The college sports pyramid in the US is a massive convoluted structure covering well over a thousand schools. Even your average “college football die hard” erroneously only sees FBS and its 130+ programs as all that there is to “college football” (yet worse, most avid college football fans know best the teams of the power conferences, which is currently over 70 of those schools).
For those who may not know, the funniest thing about not doing a full playoff, the Football Championship Series (one level below these FBS school) has been doing a full national playoff for decades 😅
Best part: the FBS playoff system isn’t actually NCAA-organized/sanctioned, which means the FCS champion is _technically_ the outright NCAA Division I champion
@@Phoenix-vr6bvnot entirely true, while the NCAA doesn't award their own national title, they still do recognize a national champion for the record books using "major selections" which have been the BCS and now the CFP
"always" LOL... you make it sound like it's some ancient tradition for it to be played on MLK Day and yet it's NEVER been played that late. EVER. until of course they had to because they expanded the playoffs.
At least they finally just got around to paying these college kids. Wild how it turned into a huge billion $ business & these players were meant to be grateful they got a college scholarship worth like $30-$50k. Most went going into boring careers, often which didn't even need a college degree & no money for the brain/body damage. Meanwhile everyone else was profiting millions/billions. Criminal
Absolutely mad how huge college football is in the USA without a proper system for deciding a champion until recently. On the other hand in basketball March Madness is one of the best tournaments in all of sports
Ya, but regular season college basketball is completely inconsequential. Meanwhile, college football used to have the best regular season in sports because of the importance of every game. But with the 12-team playoff, we get the worst of both systems!
@Alex-zs3kn college football regular season is fine, the lack of deciding a national champion what's sours things! It still bad because they put too much value in rankings and polls and not on performance on the field
@4:17 Of course all those objects ignore the fact that the NCAA FCS (originally Division IAA), Division II, and Division III playoffs have been going on since 1978 making them all bogus.
And the BCS was preceded by the Bowl Coalition, the predecessor where the conferences in it steered the top 2 teams into a bowl game so the polls would name the winner the #1 team. The Big Ten was not part of it since they valued their guaranteed Rose Bowl bid more.
They instituted a playoff, and still, perfect UCF (Central Florida) got left out for the 2017 edition, and went on to win their bowl game, and finish the season 13-0, while Alabama won the playoff, finishing at 13-1.
The problem was UCF wasn’t in a power conference and didn’t play that tough of a schedule. The only team not from a power conference to reach the 4 team playoff was Cincinnati in 2021
yeah because one of them is alabama and the other was UCF, a team that played in an inferior conference and is by all definitions, a second tier program. If the winner of the championship in england finishes with more points than the winner of the premier league, should they be champions of england instead? They had a better record after all!!! No, obviously they played interior teams, its the same exact concept.
The fundamental issue is that there are so many teams and so few games. Even if we only consider P4 conferences, there are well over 60 teams, each only playing 12/13 games. There’s no way around that. Any solution has to either reward teams in less competitive conferences or try to take into account the subjective quality of a team’s season. Some of the proposed solutions in these comments would work, but would also destroy many of the (remaining) traditions that make CFB what it is
What’s really frustrating about 2:01 is that the National Champion was declared only based on regular season wins and not after the bowl games. So, there were times where 1 and 2 in the regular season were in a bowl against eachother and 2 won the only game they played together but was still not considered the National champ.
it's not common knowledge but the current 12 team playoff is an amended version of the 4 team playoff contract that expires in 2026. so we are only guaranteed the 12 team playoff for the next 2 season. this is because The SEC and Big Ten are demanding 4 playoff spots each or else they won't sign off on the new 10 year contract starting also in 2026.
They'd still have to complete with the Pro Bowl/Pro Bowl Games which brought in 5.5 million viewers last year. Obviously the CFP Championship would do the better numbers, but the NFL has so much draw that even players playing flag football would pull a decent number of casual viewers away from the CFP.
The FBS is finally smart enough (almost) to devise a playoff format close to that which Canadian university football had figured out in the 1960s. Well done. *sarcastic clap*
The 12 team playoff is 3 times better than when it was a 4 team playoff (last year) and 6 times better than the BCS era where it almost felt random who got to play for a title based on how you played the year before, how late or early in the season your loss(es) were, etc. That was a complete joke.
The Comittee is showing that there are worse ways to select a team than the BCS rankings. You bring bask that poll but use it to select the current field of teams, I think you have the best of both worlds because most years there will be more than 2 teams who could win a championship
Not attacking you at all, everyone is entitled to their opinion. However as many are posting in these replies, the lower NCAA division football championships have been decided by playoffs for years. It's only this year NCAA Division I has finally caught up with the times (sort of). IMHO, every team that wins it's conference championship should be in the playoffs.
First of all, you obviously never had a team you've spent literally your entire life watching and hoping they'll go all the way get snubbed due to bias or nonsensical arbitrary hand waiving. I don't know where to begin with the problems the BCS had, I guess the insane money and prestige for the teams that got to play for the title and they then were able to recruit the best players which basically made it so the SEC has gotten the lion's share of the talent because all the good players want to play for the teams they know will have a shot at the title. Now very few schools outside of the SEC can compete which means that the SEC gets extra televising rights money (ESPN) which fuels the cycle even more, and then they have the money to hire all the best coaches which fuels the cycle even more, then they started the transfer portal and paying athletes which helps the SEC even more because they have all the money from playing the high profile post season games to buy the best players. On top of that this is way more exciting. We finally get to see the 12 best teams actually face each other at the end of the season. I don't know how anyone is disappointed other than the seeding system was a little strange this year but it remains to be seen who even is the best team, maybe ASU or Boise State run the table and shock all the "experts".
12 is way way wayyy too much. It should be 8, no byes, with the big four bowls as the first round. Fiesta and Peach as the semis, and a neutral site as the championship like it is now. Plus, no group of 5 should be allowed in automatically, they can get in if theyre actually good enough for an at-large.
Easy. Take a lesson from the Champions League. Run an in-season group stage and top four or eight play a post-season knockout tournament. (Or imagine instead, EUFA using a committee to choose the final eight clubs for the Champions League final.)
@ how can you have an in season group stage like the champions league when there is only one season? It’s not like Europe where teams are competing for uefa and the league title. Besides that would diminish the importance of the regular season which is the most important part of college football. Teams compete in their conferences so they can have regional bragging rights and only the very best few teams are lucky enough to get into the playoffs. How would you have a group stage with an 8 team playoff when there’s literally hundreds of teams, and those teams don’t even play most of the other teams in their conference each year, let alone any teams from other conferences of equal standing. Out of conference games are scheduled decades ahead of time, and rarely involve 2 teams of an equal standing because a win doesn’t help them in their conference and a single loss could be catastrophic. Most out of conference games involve a p5 school paying millions of dollars to bring a g5 school to their campus for what is basically an automatic win over a far lesser opponent so they can get practice before the conference schedule starts. for example right now many schools are filling out their out of conference schedule for the late 2030’s and early 2040’s. Teams only play a few games each season, definitely not enough to have a fair uefa style championship where there are only a couple dozen teams competing in the first place. College football is about the regional rivalries and the regular season, not the playoffs. The only reason they even started having a national championship a few years ago was because most of the best teams could never possibly play any other equally good teams in another conference so there was no way to determine who is best. They are students like anyone else at the university, they are only allowed to practice a few hours each week, and they don’t generally play teams from outside of their region except for in bowl games. Flying across the country on a 5 hour flight each week might work for professional teams, but you can’t justify adding games to cfb lest it distract players from their academic duties.
@ only some conferences play 4 non conference teams each season. Most only play 3. Each conference is not on an equal level of competition so it’s not possible to say that a 3-0 team is better than a 2-1 or even 1-2 or 0-3 team if they didn’t play the exact same opponents. There are far too many teams and variables for such a system to exist fairly.
@@GraemeMacDermid how would you determine who the top 8 teams are? Teams are most assuredly not on equal playing fields, and It’s not like every team can play the same teams as everyone else when there’s several hundred teams in contention.
Hearing a British voice talk about college football is breaking my brain lmao
Some of us watch the sport as intensely as Americans you know! There was turmoil a couple of years back when WBD, who took over a channel called BT Sport in the UK cancelled all NCAA programming. Luckily Sky Sports picked up 3 games a week.
Only thing I don't worry about missing is Cowturd and Stephen A.
@@WilVincent88 I can't blame you about Stephen A, he pisses me off
I was confused af even when I was living in the US. After I finally managed to understand how it works, I basically immediately started complaining about the selection committee's biases.
ladies and gentlemen. ^ is your average casual fan who has no business giving their opinion on anything sports related
@@ChaseRiver2 - 🤓🤓🤓
A tangential but relevant bit of history is that the NCAA did begin to organize a championship in football in 1978. But at that time, the big schools were satisfied with the bowl system, so they petitioned the NCAA for the right to opt out of the postseason championship - leading NCAA’s Division I to split into I-A and I-AA (the only sport where this is the case).
The NCAA had predicted 65 of the 145 schools in the old Division I would join Division I-AA to compete for the championship. In fact, only 8 did (and 7 of those had joined Division I just one year earlier). Today, the divisions are known as the Football Bowl Subdivision and the Football Championship Subdivision, with the FCS consisting mostly of teams that have moved up from Division II. The College Football Playoff (which includes teams that are otherwise in the “Bowl Subdivision”) is not organized by the NCAA.
Yeah the FBS is essentially run by the commissioners of the different conferences I’m pretty sure
Definitely needs to be mentioned. The college sports pyramid in the US is a massive convoluted structure covering well over a thousand schools. Even your average “college football die hard” erroneously only sees FBS and its 130+ programs as all that there is to “college football” (yet worse, most avid college football fans know best the teams of the power conferences, which is currently over 70 of those schools).
For those who may not know, the funniest thing about not doing a full playoff, the Football Championship Series (one level below these FBS school) has been doing a full national playoff for decades 😅
Best part: the FBS playoff system isn’t actually NCAA-organized/sanctioned, which means the FCS champion is _technically_ the outright NCAA Division I champion
@@Phoenix-vr6bvnot entirely true, while the NCAA doesn't award their own national title, they still do recognize a national champion for the record books using "major selections" which have been the BCS and now the CFP
The random Monday in January is MLD Day which is a national holiday and we all have off work/school. It is always the third Monday of January
That’s only because the playoff expanded. In past years, if I’m not mistaken, the championship was the week before MLK day
"always" LOL... you make it sound like it's some ancient tradition for it to be played on MLK Day and yet it's NEVER been played that late. EVER. until of course they had to because they expanded the playoffs.
Guys he's saying MLK Day is always on that day, not the Game. I know, pronouns can be confusing sometimes (uh oh I said pronouns)
@@randorandom He’s saying MLK Day is always on the 3rd Monday of January, not the game.
At least they finally just got around to paying these college kids. Wild how it turned into a huge billion $ business & these players were meant to be grateful they got a college scholarship worth like $30-$50k. Most went going into boring careers, often which didn't even need a college degree & no money for the brain/body damage. Meanwhile everyone else was profiting millions/billions. Criminal
Absolutely mad how huge college football is in the USA without a proper system for deciding a champion until recently. On the other hand in basketball March Madness is one of the best tournaments in all of sports
It's still a rigg show March madness has all conferences the CFP doesnt
Ya, but regular season college basketball is completely inconsequential. Meanwhile, college football used to have the best regular season in sports because of the importance of every game. But with the 12-team playoff, we get the worst of both systems!
@Alex-zs3kn that was a perception , cbb in early season is always overshadowed by football.
@Alex-zs3kn college football regular season is fine, the lack of deciding a national champion what's sours things! It still bad because they put too much value in rankings and polls and not on performance on the field
@4:17 Of course all those objects ignore the fact that the NCAA FCS (originally Division IAA), Division II, and Division III playoffs have been going on since 1978 making them all bogus.
And the BCS was preceded by the Bowl Coalition, the predecessor where the conferences in it steered the top 2 teams into a bowl game so the polls would name the winner the #1 team. The Big Ten was not part of it since they valued their guaranteed Rose Bowl bid more.
They instituted a playoff, and still, perfect UCF (Central Florida) got left out for the 2017 edition, and went on to win their bowl game, and finish the season 13-0, while Alabama won the playoff, finishing at 13-1.
Everyone knows the selection committee has a perpetual pro-Alabama bias. Saban's dark magic, I guess. And it's forever at UCF's expense.
The problem was UCF wasn’t in a power conference and didn’t play that tough of a schedule. The only team not from a power conference to reach the 4 team playoff was Cincinnati in 2021
yeah because one of them is alabama and the other was UCF, a team that played in an inferior conference and is by all definitions, a second tier program. If the winner of the championship in england finishes with more points than the winner of the premier league, should they be champions of england instead? They had a better record after all!!! No, obviously they played interior teams, its the same exact concept.
Alabama wasn't even the best team in their state in 2017
The problem isn't the playoff system
It's all those small-PP SEC ADs having their egos being stepped on
There was also Bowl Alliance/Coalition in the early-to-mid '90s, which also didn't work very well
More confused after the video than I was at the introduction
It's football 🏈 play the game. Win the game good. Lose the game bad. Win all the games more good 👍 easy 😂
The fundamental issue is that there are so many teams and so few games. Even if we only consider P4 conferences, there are well over 60 teams, each only playing 12/13 games. There’s no way around that. Any solution has to either reward teams in less competitive conferences or try to take into account the subjective quality of a team’s season. Some of the proposed solutions in these comments would work, but would also destroy many of the (remaining) traditions that make CFB what it is
What’s really frustrating about 2:01 is that the National Champion was declared only based on regular season wins and not after the bowl games. So, there were times where 1 and 2 in the regular season were in a bowl against eachother and 2 won the only game they played together but was still not considered the National champ.
it's not common knowledge but the current 12 team playoff is an amended version of the 4 team playoff contract that expires in 2026. so we are only guaranteed the 12 team playoff for the next 2 season. this is because The SEC and Big Ten are demanding 4 playoff spots each or else they won't sign off on the new 10 year contract starting also in 2026.
The funny thing is that all other college sports in American has a playoff tournament, except for division 1 FBS college football
Now all they have to do is move the final to the weekend before the Super Bowl so they can have it on a Saturday without worrying about the NFL.
They'd still have to complete with the Pro Bowl/Pro Bowl Games which brought in 5.5 million viewers last year. Obviously the CFP Championship would do the better numbers, but the NFL has so much draw that even players playing flag football would pull a decent number of casual viewers away from the CFP.
The FBS is finally smart enough (almost) to devise a playoff format close to that which Canadian university football had figured out in the 1960s. Well done. *sarcastic clap*
I cannot fathom a selection committee (randomly) selecting teams to get into playoffs 🤷
The 12 team playoff is 3 times better than when it was a 4 team playoff (last year) and 6 times better than the BCS era where it almost felt random who got to play for a title based on how you played the year before, how late or early in the season your loss(es) were, etc. That was a complete joke.
I played college football for a school at the division 2 level. The NCAA has a tournament in that division with 28 schools selected to participate.
It’s actually not complicated
Sun bowl should do a round of 16 playoff game, but the city of el paso would never pay that much so nvm.
i dont think i'd ever watch college football if it werent on a Saturday where i can be up until ungodly hours for big games
This is going to get me attacked. But I didn't hate the BCS and was quite hesitant towards the initial play off. 12 teams is just too much for me.
The Comittee is showing that there are worse ways to select a team than the BCS rankings. You bring bask that poll but use it to select the current field of teams, I think you have the best of both worlds because most years there will be more than 2 teams who could win a championship
Not attacking you at all, everyone is entitled to their opinion. However as many are posting in these replies, the lower NCAA division football championships have been decided by playoffs for years. It's only this year NCAA Division I has finally caught up with the times (sort of). IMHO, every team that wins it's conference championship should be in the playoffs.
First of all, you obviously never had a team you've spent literally your entire life watching and hoping they'll go all the way get snubbed due to bias or nonsensical arbitrary hand waiving.
I don't know where to begin with the problems the BCS had, I guess the insane money and prestige for the teams that got to play for the title and they then were able to recruit the best players which basically made it so the SEC has gotten the lion's share of the talent because all the good players want to play for the teams they know will have a shot at the title.
Now very few schools outside of the SEC can compete which means that the SEC gets extra televising rights money (ESPN) which fuels the cycle even more, and then they have the money to hire all the best coaches which fuels the cycle even more, then they started the transfer portal and paying athletes which helps the SEC even more because they have all the money from playing the high profile post season games to buy the best players.
On top of that this is way more exciting. We finally get to see the 12 best teams actually face each other at the end of the season. I don't know how anyone is disappointed other than the seeding system was a little strange this year but it remains to be seen who even is the best team, maybe ASU or Boise State run the table and shock all the "experts".
I thought 8 would have been perfect. No byes.
12 is way way wayyy too much. It should be 8, no byes, with the big four bowls as the first round. Fiesta and Peach as the semis, and a neutral site as the championship like it is now. Plus, no group of 5 should be allowed in automatically, they can get in if theyre actually good enough for an at-large.
I'm still surprised my Arizona State Sun Devils secure the #4 seed in the playoffs.
I will never be ok with the championship being played on a Monday
Easy. Take a lesson from the Champions League. Run an in-season group stage and top four or eight play a post-season knockout tournament.
(Or imagine instead, EUFA using a committee to choose the final eight clubs for the Champions League final.)
@@GraemeMacDermid that’s not possible with college football
@ Why not? It seems each team plays four non-conference games each season.
@ how can you have an in season group stage like the champions league when there is only one season? It’s not like Europe where teams are competing for uefa and the league title. Besides that would diminish the importance of the regular season which is the most important part of college football. Teams compete in their conferences so they can have regional bragging rights and only the very best few teams are lucky enough to get into the playoffs. How would you have a group stage with an 8 team playoff when there’s literally hundreds of teams, and those teams don’t even play most of the other teams in their conference each year, let alone any teams from other conferences of equal standing. Out of conference games are scheduled decades ahead of time, and rarely involve 2 teams of an equal standing because a win doesn’t help them in their conference and a single loss could be catastrophic. Most out of conference games involve a p5 school paying millions of dollars to bring a g5 school to their campus for what is basically an automatic win over a far lesser opponent so they can get practice before the conference schedule starts. for example right now many schools are filling out their out of conference schedule for the late 2030’s and early 2040’s. Teams only play a few games each season, definitely not enough to have a fair uefa style championship where there are only a couple dozen teams competing in the first place. College football is about the regional rivalries and the regular season, not the playoffs. The only reason they even started having a national championship a few years ago was because most of the best teams could never possibly play any other equally good teams in another conference so there was no way to determine who is best. They are students like anyone else at the university, they are only allowed to practice a few hours each week, and they don’t generally play teams from outside of their region except for in bowl games. Flying across the country on a 5 hour flight each week might work for professional teams, but you can’t justify adding games to cfb lest it distract players from their academic duties.
@ only some conferences play 4 non conference teams each season. Most only play 3. Each conference is not on an equal level of competition so it’s not possible to say that a 3-0 team is better than a 2-1 or even 1-2 or 0-3 team if they didn’t play the exact same opponents. There are far too many teams and variables for such a system to exist fairly.
@@GraemeMacDermid how would you determine who the top 8 teams are? Teams are most assuredly not on equal playing fields, and It’s not like every team can play the same teams as everyone else when there’s several hundred teams in contention.
Personally, I just ignore the AP polls and the CFP. I only care about team stats.
College football is deeply confusing
how much did they have to pay joe to narrate this video lmao
More football in January so the withdraws hit harder when it's all over in Febuary.
Justice for FSU
American culture really was developed by 10 year old children
Children did not develop this
@ scary to think adults did
@@caio5987 why? I have no idea what your point is
It was actually developed by several different countries... with a handful of the indigenous that are still around.
The European mind cannot comprehend the great sport of college football