Friday, November 07, 2008

Not So Fast

Earlier in the week I lauded Obama for his courageous stance on a college football playoff system. Tim Colishaw takes umbrage with Obama's position in today's column:

We have just sent a dangerous man to the White House. Let's not kid ourselves about it.

Say all the positives you want about the feel-good story of President-elect Barack Obama. The bottom line is this is a man ... who wants a college football playoff.

Obama said that very thing at halftime of ESPN's Monday Night Football . And we elected him, anyway.

What were we thinking?

Ha. The rest of Colishaw's column is worth reading, but really I don't see how his defense of the BCS doesn't just boil down to a "this is the way we've always done it so let's stick to it." I'm definitely not a fan of over-inclusiveness when it comes to playoff systems. Major League Soccer's system, where most teams will make the post-season, is a joke (though to be fair, that was more of a business strategy, and low-seeded teams routinely make it all the way to the championship game thanks to excessive league parity.) Something similar could be said for the NBA, where no team below the sixth seed has ever won the finals. Still, as far as I'm concerned, letting in a few teams that will prove only to be warm-ups for higher quality teams, is much more preferable to letting computers decide your champion.

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