The Super Bowl the grand daddy of them all. I'm sure people around the U.S know what the Super Bowl is, even if people don't watch football. In order for the two teams to make it to the Super Bowl they went through the playoffs. Sounds easy enough when there is only thirty-two teams in the league right? What about college football? In division 1A football there is no playoff system. Division 1A has one hundred and nineteen teams in there league.
How does the league determine who goes to the championship game without a playoff system? Well for the past twelve years division 1A has used what is called the BCS. BCS stands for Bowl Championship Series. In college football there is a series of games called bowls. That is where the bowl part in BCS comes from. The BCS has four bowl games which if a team is part of the SEC, Big Ten, Big 12,ACC,Pac-10, Big East and if they win there conference the get am automatic placement into the BCS. If a team wins there conference then what's the problem then? The problem is that there are more conferences that don't get that automatic placement.




A team from the automatic placement conference could win seven games and win there conference and still be in the BCS. While a team from a non-automatic conference could win eleven games and not make the BCS. Does that seem fair for those non-placement teams? The big debate is, should there be a playoff system in division 1A college football?
In my opinion I believe there should be a playoff system. The reason? It would give smaller schools the opportunity to have the chance to be national champions. Every sports fan loves a Cinderella story or a David verses Goliath. Perfect example college basketball has the NCAA tournament which allows sixty-four teams the chance to be champions no matter how big or how small there school is. According to a survey on cnnsi.com eighty-two percent of fans would like to see an eight or sixteen team playoff system.
There are strong arguments that have been made by both sides. The most strongest argument for a change in a playoff system is that the need to have a true champion. The BCS's twelve year history in several of those seasons have ended in controversy of which team was really the real champion. Even though there is a solid fan support towards a long playoff system, college presidents, coaches, and athletic directors are not on the same page.
There fear is that of there is a playoff system would not get paid when they play in small bowl games to get money to build there program. For example Iowa State University played in the Crucial.com Humanitarian Bowl and surly Americans could care less who played or where in that game, but the benefit for Iowa State is they received $750,000 check for playing in the bowl. With that money the university used more that $472,000 in college scholarships. Iowa State had a lot riding in this game even though the game had no national attention.
However, playoff supporters argue that the revenues made by a playoff system could draw in as much as the Super Bowl does. The projected numbers towards a playoff system could bring in four hundred million dollars and with that money being distributed equally between all one hundred and nine-teen teams, each university could receive two to three million dollars each season.
It will be a while until a playoff system is found to have the perfect equation to benefit all the schools, coaches, players, and mainly the fans. Even president Barack Obama proposed that college football should have a playoff system. For the average person this has no meaning, but to a college football fanatic this is the next biggest deal to health care in America. Let's just hope this problem gets resolved in the near future.