Replies

I think if basketball had only 10-13 games on their schedule and they were played on Saturdays, the games would become a lot more important. The tournaments would be even more epic.

But if you had a 8-team playoff in football, there’s no guarantee (at the beginning of the season) any school would make it. I don’t think it will happen anytime in the near future, however.

Basketball comes close to structural perfection when it comes to designing a season. There are a host of early tournaments designed to mingle conference opponents and get a lay of the land as far as how deep each conference is. Regular season morphs into conference play, which in the elite conferences is just a bloodbath. Then conference tournaments take place, giving the marginal teams in each conference one last crack at the tournament. Then we have selection Sunday.

There are controversies every year regarding who gets in, but it's not an outrage (except for the junkies who can't let go of a snub).

Football could easily do an 8 or 16 team tourney without a conference structure; just continue to use the BCS criteria. The further from number 1 your ranking, the less outrageous it is that you don't get in. Yes, you miff the alums from the #17 ranked team, but so what?

And for people who claim that the regular season wouldn't matter, that's just silly. It would matter no more or less than it does now; you would be vying for rankings based on polls and computers. The only tweak I would make is withholding rankings until after a few games are played.