Mike Leach: 64 team playoff!

zoogs

zoogs

Assistant Coach
http://espn.go.com/blog/pac12/post/_/id/88823/mike-leach-advocates-for-64-team-playoff

I've changed my view on this a lot over the years, and really echo Leach's sentiments here.

Anyway, who cares about the regular season? The opening third is already meaningless anyway, for most teams.

Let there be chaos. Let's get a shorter regular season with most teams making the dance. Teams get those two months to work on things and round into form, which is no different than what they are doing and have always done, only the penalties and rewards are different.

And then let the fun begin. There's plenty of parity in today's game. Maybe the nature of football isn't as wacky as soccer can be, but who's to say some Arizona or Arizona State or Washington State can't go and knock off a top seed in an early round? If you want to make it to the finals, then win every game when it counts.

It would also make college football interesting to watch outside of our own teams of interest.

The CFB postseason and championship hunt should not be the exclusive, privileged domain of the handful of P5 teams who scheduled correctly or emerged the victor in just enough of the few conference schedule tilts that matter every year. If those teams are so good, they can prove it over and over by playing anybody in the country -- as it should be.

 
In a playoff-specific interview with Leach on Wednesday, he said the sport should cut the regular season to 10 games and have the playoff start with a home-and-home series in the first round. His idea is that the existing bowls would cover the other games, and the champion would play 16 games.
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I guess I don't follow this. Is he saying the first round would be two games, each team hosting one? That would be more than 16 games. And why the first round?

Anyway, that's way too many. For starters, the big schools aren't going to give up home games. Second, even shortening the season to 10 games - and, I'm assuming, eliminating the CCGs - would be nearly impossible to work around finals and holidays to get in six rounds of playoffs.

And I think the nature of football is that the regular season should be meaningful. Having a four- or eight-team playoff doesn't diminish the regular season. But 64 teams is how many total Power 5 teams there are.

I don't mind a four-team playoff - which is much better than what we had - but eight is the right number. The regular season still matters a lot but you don't have to leave out one-loss teams that are very hard to distinguish from one another.

 
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It would be crazy to watch as a fan, thats for sure.

But I will echo my thoughts from earlier. Why, Mr. Leach, don't we have a 64 team playoff? Because we don't need to watch Duke vs Wazzu to determine the top 4-8 teams in the country.

We will see the playoff expanded in the next 5-6 years I am guessing. Likely to 8 teams with Power 5 champions getting auto bids plus 3 at larges/Notre "will hang onto our pointless independence" Dame.

As a fan, the more we expand the field, the more fun it gets.

As a Husker fan, I would rather us have the current mountain to climb to bring home a 6th National Championship.

 
If 64 is too much, then I'd like to see 32.

I don't just want to see the teams with the strongest records or regular season accomplishments make it. If they want to play in the championship, surely they can earn it in a series of games.

And I like Cinderella stories more than anything. A team like Wazzu is not going to get to the title game, not without a top notch August to November and high poll rankings. But if they're a Top 30 team that gets their foot in the door, then pulls off a string of big upsets? Who could say they weren't deserving?

The reality is that every team plays de facto playoff games already. They're just at different weeks of the year, in different conferences. This is much less sensible to me than an actual, high stakes tournament. Michigan State lost theirs on Nov 8. Miss State lost theirs on Nov 29. TCU lost theirs on Oct 11th; we just didn't know it at the time. Baylor on Oct 18th. It doesn't really have to be this way.

I know we're probably locked in, procedure wise, in any number of ways -- and that just seems disappointing.

 
The ONLY reason I would like to watch 64 team playoff is to see SEC schools travel north to play in cold weather.

Also what Leach meant by home and home is that the schools would host the first round. Likely the higher seed.

 
Coach Power'T said:
Also what Leach meant by home and home is that the schools would host the first round. Likely the higher seed.
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I figured that's what was meant but it says "home-and-home series" which is oddly worded. Of course, it is Leach.
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Or the first two rounds are on campus of the higher seed.

Losing two games would mean a lot of money lost by the non-qualifiers (and the local merchants)

 
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