Two left handed quarterbacks, two teams that knocked off two undefeated teams each to get there, and lots of orange and blue. Put it all in a Rose Bowl and stir, and you have a championship college football game. Florida, who knocked off TCU and conference foe Alabama is ready to let Urban hip-hop to a brief leave. Boise State knocked off Cincinnati and Texas, and is ready to upstage all of the automatic qualifiers.
With the big discussion this year in the NFL regarding teams rolling over to keep healthy for the playoffs, one might wonder if the same thing might happen in a college tourney situation. For instance, undefeated Alabama and Florida played in the SEC championship in a huge match-up to determine who would make the BCS championship. Would a playoff have produced the same intensity?
1) No more tears: I think in my playoff scenario, the post-game tears of the losers, and maybe even the chest pains of Urban Meyer would have been avoided. Basically, the loser knew they were an at-large team in the tourney, and the quest for number 1 was not Gone with the Wind with a loss in Atlanta.
2) Still play all out for top seed: But I think there would still be incentive to win that game, so that it would not become a game of second stringers playing out the season. Alabama's win gave them top seed, a chance to play the eight or nine seed, and to stay closer to home at the Sugar Bowl. The loser would drop to another location to play a higher seed.
Now this season, that didn't seem so bad. In my mythical fun, I had Florida as five seed and travelling to Pasadena to play TCU. In hindsight, that seemed pretty cushy, and not much worse than Alabama playing Ohio State in New Orleans. But the previous season, I had Alabama losing the SEC championship and being sentenced to play USC (from LA not Strom Thurmond's home state) in Pasadena, and projected a Trojan whipping. Meanwhile, Florida got to play 10th seed Virginia Tech in the SuperDome, and leave with a pretty easy win.
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