I feel like people were trying to fool us into believing that there would be less bitching about the post-season in general if playoffs were implemented. Because there seems to be no less bitching going on right now.
Well, that would be a naïve thing to believe. What you call bitching, the suits call engagement. There will always be bitching; that's a feature, not a bug.
The improvement here is that the, uh, engagement is a bit further removed from things that actually matter, namely, that the teams that should have a shot at the title are included. Like March Madness, the decisions about which bubble teams are in or out have little impact on the eventual champion. Sure, some objectively undeserving teams are also included in the name of equity, but so what? The best teams are all present.
kono
Agreed. It's the only major sport that practically insists on this level of controversy. It's so weird, and it keep insisting on allowing itself to be the subject of controversy.
And totally agree with you on march madness, or really any other NCAA tourny. There are so many teams in it that (if you took march madness for example) you're arguing that teams left out are (possibly) only the 68th best team there is, and shouldn't have been 69th. No one objectively looks at it and goes "oh yeah, this sucks cause that last team left out could easily win this whole thing!" Cause hell no, they for all aspects most certainly can't/won't, and everyone already included already are "better" based on either winning their conference or are using at least something more object like RPI/NET etc. ratings to at least add a level of objectivity to it. If the committee at that point shafts a team that went 9-9 in their conference and they didn't win anything based on NET in their non-con well don't be surprised you got left out! And no one really bemoans not being included, only the few teams that couldn't perform enough to be included.
Instead CFB does this weird thing where it's so "eyeball" and "conference strength" and "media" driven that it leads to this incessant complaining. It all started with the media (and then coaches) voting and being like "yup that team is best!". Then it switched to the BCS which brought some objectivity to it but still was only there to match two teams. Are those two really the best? Then the 4 team playoff helped more but then they brought in a committee who is just doing whatever leading back to the controversy. And then they decided to "fix" it by just expanding it a bit and adding small amount of objectivity to by having winning your conference matters (to a degree). It's so weird and no professional sport, no other college sport, hell not any high school sport, determines it's champion this way. It's made to have all this crap. It's by design.
If you either replaced the committee and used like the BCS to rank teams into a playoff, or the committee had to use something like the BCS (the NET of football), and you also have some mechanism that auto qualifies you based on something like winning your conference, and it was big enough (be it 16, 24, 32 w/e teams) then the bitching goes away, or at least it's no longer contained near the top, but way lower down where again you shouldn't be surprised your team got left out.