Playoff?

Now that the most compelling, entertaining and dramatic college football season in recent memory has drawn to a close, sportswriters and broadcasters are doing what they always do this time of the year. They are crafting lies to convince you that major-college football is in disarray and in dire need of a playoff system to save itself.
Many teams controlled their destiny at some point during the season but then would lose it. So sorry Oklahoma, but maybe you shouldn't have blown that seventeen point lead at a mediocre Colorado. Regrets to Georgia but what was the final margin of defeat at Tennessee again ... 35-14? Apologies to USC, but really, you can't lose at home in the Coliseum to a 4-8 Stanford and expect mercy. So ends an entirely captivating, wildly absorbing, deliciously unpredictable college football regular season. And now at the finish, what do we see? Controversy, mayhem, protests. Amid all the fun, we have people yelling that the sport has to change. It needs a playoff system, why? So the casual fans who are confused by the BCS and the angry columnists who write about college football three times a year can get finality. Great idea, let's make college football more like the NFL, which would rival rodeo in popularity if it weren't for gambling and fantasy football. Or better yet, let's have a sixteen-team playoff as is done in the NBA. We all love the NCAA basketball tournament, but a football team can't play six games in eighteen days. College football plays meaningful games every Saturday and even some Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays.
Let us also take a look at the academic side of things. College football has been a one semester sport since the beginning of time and that is not about to change anytime soon with most schools. It is a unanimous factor that college football should only be a one semester sport due to the fact that these young adults are still in school and if they do not go on to play professional football they need their degrees. Just think if a player is critically injured and is never cleared by the medical staff to play football again, what are they going to do if they never earned their degree? Football players need their degrees as stated by many high profile recruits like Russell Shepard, “Football is not going to last forever and to sit down with an expert of my major was a very good impression.” Many highschool players are now taking in to consideration the academics they will receive at a school not just the prestige of the football program.
The regular-season games are so great because there's a do-or-die component to every one involving a title contender. These are trapeze artists working without a net.If we had a playoff, last year's Ohio State-Michigan game would have been almost meaningless, with the loser knowing it would be an at-large selection(team that is not the number one from their conference but still receive a bid). Same for this year’s LSU-Arkansas game, if you had conference champions advancing to an eight-team playoff, LSU, having already clinched a berth in the SEC title game, would have rested its regulars and college football fans all around the world would have missed out on one of the games of the year. This football season has been one of the most exciting ever. The number one team was getting knocked off every other weekend by some less prestigious school. Schools like South Florida and Missouri were sitting atop the Coaches and AP polls. We had heisman contenders in Matt Grothe, University of South Florida; Andre Woodson, University of Kentucky; and Matt Ryan, Boston College; who all turned out to be pretenders but that is the point. Players people had never heard of coming into the season were potentially college football’s most prolific player of the year. The point being there is no need for a playoff because there already is one, the regular season. It’s what makes college football what it is. This past year attendance records in the Big12 and SEC were set to a new precedent. College football made more money than any other time before and that should only increase over time.
So here it is in a nutshell, the system did NOT get it right, but this is only because there is no right answer. Someone will always feel shafted. Someone will always have another case to make. There will always be politicking, because if you need two teams, you can't pick three. And if you need eight, you can't choose nine. What the BCS did this year is get it the least wrong, under the given circumstances. Don't like Ohio State vs. LSU? Make a better argument for someone else. Not that easy to do. Ohio State lost once. No other team from a BCS conference can match that except Kansas, and Kansas beat only two teams with winning records. LSU lost twice, both times in triple overtime, and had six victories against opponents that were once ranked in the top twenty-five. The Tigers won the SEC title without their starting quarterback and with their head coach supposedly halfway to Michigan, according to ESPN analyst Kirk Herbstreit. That hardly turns Oklahoma or Georgia or USC into corned beef hash. But no team that lost twice really has cause to scream foul. Each controlled its own destiny at some point. LSU had the soundest claim, even if historically improbable.
And please, enough about being "the best team at the end." That is not the way college football works. The entire season is a body of work that should be judged. Teams play 12 or 13 games, they should all count.