It's another path to keeping things competitively interesting for everybody. Not a path that makes a great deal of sense to me, but a path.
Well, but that's putting words in my mouth. I have two contentions here: 1. The more competitive juice in any given game, the better. Seems tautological. 2. The big four leagues have real meaninglessness problems for a pretty broad swath of their game inventory. Which led to my initial response in this thread. The NFL has many virtues as an entertainment product. The consistent creation of concrete competitive stakes of the kind more endemic to college football and major European soccer leagues is not one of them. There are other masters to serve in alignment and scheduling discussions, but in my view that's the single most important one, and one that should never leave one's field of vision.
There are plenty of meaningless games in Europe. Not all leagues have 6 or 7 teams qualifying for international competitions. There used top be a lot more meaningless games, so they introduced "American style" playoffs for championships, promotion, relegation and European qualification.
There are meaningless games in college football too. There are just fewer of them. Not sure why that's so hard for everyone to wrap their head around. The other thing about the NFL is that even the biggest games of the regular season have pretty limited competitive stakes. Take that 49ers/Saints game last week that was so fun. A fine 3 hours of sports TV as far as it goes, but between two teams safely in position to play the games that actually matter next month. Which is not to say that all 16 NFC teams should just play a round-robin to determine one Super Bowl berth. Maybe they should, but that would present its own problems. What I'm advocating above all else is to be thinking on these terms. These are the critical questions of how to structure the league, IMO.
I really do wish the front office people of MLS would get off this "only 2 conferences" nonsense. With a 30-team league, they ought to go with 6 divisions of 5 teams in each. Play your division foes twice and everyone else once. That gives you 33 games. The 34th game would be a second contest with a non-division opponent. The 6 divisional winners make the playoffs followed by the next best 8 or 10 teams (depending on how big you want the playoffs to be). Groups: 1. New England, Montreal, Toronto, 2 New York teams 2. Philadelphia, DC, Columbus, Chicago, Cincinnati 3. Charlotte, Nashville, Atlanta, Orlando, Miami 4. St. Louis, Minnesota, SKC, Colorado, RSL 5. 3 Texas teams and the 2 LA teams 6. 2 NorCal teams and 3 from Cascadia Just a thought. Reports are saying MLS should stop with expansion for a few years and let the dust settle from the frenzy of adding new teams. I wonder if that would really happen.
The point is, that is your opinion. IMO, there are more meaningless games in college football than basically any other sport. Well over half the teams start the year with no shot at a title at all.... regardless of what they do. The vast majority of the rest are out of the hunt after week one of the conference slate. Only 3% of the field qualifies for the playoffs and basically the same 8 or so teams get there every year. There is no major sport with more competitive imbalance, more blowouts and frankly more out and out cheating than college football. Yeah, there are some great matchups every week with a lot on the line, but those matchups exclude a huge majority of teams from about week 4 on.
The 49ers are in a situation where they need to win out their last two games to avoid being the #5 seed needing three road wins to reach the Super Bowl. Getting that win was pretty important to them, but maybe not as important as the late season Big Ten matchup that determines who goes to the Pinstripe Bowl instead of the Redbox Bowl.
It will probably come as little shock to you that I am vehemently against the playoff. It's not my opinion that getting a 6th win in college football represents concrete stakes. That's a fact. It's my opinion that those stakes are more meaningful than, say, sneaking into the 8th seed in the East in the NBA playoffs. I concede that that's a matter of opinion. But I have extreme confidence that I would win that argument in the eyes of any objective observer.
Just to follow up on that here are the Super Bowl winners conference seeds for the last 29 years, the current NFL playoff format. #1 seed - 14 Super Bowl wins #2 seed - 7 #3 seed - 1 #4 seed - 4 #5 seed - 1 #6 seed - 2 21 of the 29 Super Bowl winners got the bye and then at least one home game in the conference semifinals. Obviously those top seeds were good teams but finishing 1 or 2 is pretty important. The top NFC teams right now are: SEA 11-3 GBY 11-3 NOS 11-3 * SFO 11-3 MIN 10-4 Every game by those top teams is very important. San Francisco beating New Orleans kept them alive for one of those top two spots. *The NFC East winner will get the #4 spot.
If you must have playoffs, byes and home field are a good way to make regular season matchups important. The new MLS playoffs format are a big improvement in that regard, IMO. The two-legged tie is overrated.
The stakes are that you get to be one of the 62% of teams that get a couple more weeks of practice and a game on a non-holiday Monday at 1 pm in Santa Clara. I've followed my favorite college football team (which will also be playing at 1 pm in Santa Clara) for almost 40 years, and there have been only 4 or 5 seasons in that time when they played any games at all that were meaningful to the competitive structure of the sport. Most years, the motivation comes from trying to win rivalry games and getting the occasional upset against a big opponent, rival or not. Some years, it's just about trying not to get completely embarrassed, regardless of opponent. Those things build memories and shared experience for the fan community, but don't have much to do with the standings/championship format. There's some novelty in trying to get a bowl bid that isn't completely uninspiring, but all the December bowls tend to blend together when you've been to only one semi-major bowl since the Eisenhower administration.... I'd suggest that is mostly because you are emotionally invested in a college football team that's likely to have lots of 6-6 seasons and not at all emotionally invested in the fate of any NBA team. An NBA-only fan who doesn't follow college football would say that the 8th seed isn't much, but they'd choose a best-of-seven in tournament play against the best of their conference over a single-game exhibition against the 8th seed from the West.
I guess my argument is that in some sense they ARE part of the standings/championship format. I compared it to making the Europa League in an earlier post. A meaningless poison chalice for Man United, the thrill of a lifetime for Burnley. Different teams have different expectation levels and different goals. I love sports that are like that, personally. And I say that as a fan of the type of team that the American big four theory would characterize as financially non-viable without preferential draft picks to give it a leg up. No, an NBA fan would rather be the 12th seed than the 8th. The NBA has gotten to a place where fans of teams are praying to lose from the outset of seasons or even multiple seasons. It's a comprehensively broken competitive model, and the reason why increasingly radical change is being contemplated.
IIRC from Pardon the Interruption the other week, they were discussing the NBA's strengths and weaknesses and the one topic that stood out to me is how much fan interest as it is measured by TV ratings and the like are down. And they went on to discuss the radical changes you speak of. Personally, the sport as is played in the NBA now is often glorified pick up games in tactics, or lack there of, and shear lack of basic basketball 101 wisdom. Basically the games are ugly and Americans are leaving it in droves. But still watch and enjoy the more eye appealing NCAA brand of basketball. Garber and MLS HQ once again should take from what makes the NCAA scene different than the NBA scene and learn from this. I see what you did there. Winning a game late on, that sends you to a mimic of a Cup Final from soccer. A Bowl Game. And if wining that. It is not unlike late in the season for an MLS team to go out and win the Open Cup even though the league season has been hit n miss for players and the fans alike.
Why are we discussing college sports when we could be discussing something more relevant like association football in England in 1892?
I think a lot, if not most, objective observers would absolutely disagree with this. I suppose as a fan of a team that rarely qualifies for a bowl, it is a bigger deal than some other fanbases. However, for a great many others (and for neutral observers) it really doesn’t mean much. Sure it is nice from a development perspective to get 15 extra practices, but competitively it means next to nothing and those bowl games don’t draw much of an audience either on TV or in person. Unfortunately as an MSU fan, I know this firsthand. Conversely, the 8 seed in the NBA has a shot at the, you know, NBA Championship. May be a very long shot, but it’s one someone in the Pinstripe Bowl sure as hell doesn’t have. You claim that all these teams would rather finish high in the lottery than 8th. Would young teams who have been on the outside of the playoffs looking in for a number of years? Does playoff experience not benefit a team like say the Suns with a young core looking to build and perhaps attract a key free agent piece? You state it is a fact that getting a 6th win carries with it concrete stakes. Well, so does making the NBA playoffs and a lot of people (and I suspect most people). would argue they are far higher than qualifying for the 35th best bowl in a 125 team college football landscape.
Well that's ultimately all I'm saying, which is why I made the Europa League comparison. And I think you hit the nail on the head talking about the "development perspective". A bowl can be a route to somewhere. The 8 seed is a route to nowhere.
Except when say you’re a young team like the 1986 Bulls who used the experience to learn against a superior team, steadily improved year over year, and ultimately won an NBA championship five years later. Maybe I’ll just circle back in five years and we can compare that development to the development the Illini make over the next five years when they definitely won’t still suck because of all that bowl practice development they got. Development which I’m sure is gonna be totally superior to the development of the 42 other power five schools who also qualified for bowl games this year.
At the end of the day we're just not seeing eye to eye here on the rhythms of big four fandom which are, admittedly, a matter of taste.
There's very little resemblance between the Europa League and a one-off game between two similarly mediocre teams. Yet sometimes an 8-seed becomes an all-time beloved squad to the fanbase, even after the team wins 3 championships in 4 years. https://ftw.usatoday.com/2019/04/golden-state-warriors-we-believe-uniforms-oracle
The problem with football in 1892 was Preston North End were so dominant, and there was no play-offs nor pro/rel (actually I'm not sure about that). It was better than regional leagues and arranged fixtures which is what had existed before. So really, the 4 year-old national league was doing well, why go back to regional leagues as some here propose with East/West Conferences?
Actually I stand corrected on several fronts. Sunderland won the league that season, Preston North End finished 2nd. And there was a 2nd division with promotion/relegation, which was done via play-offs (test matches they called them). Ha! Also, the whole league looks like it was midlands and north, so not really national.
It was the failure of the Alliance League which led to the creation of the Second Division and the implementation of promotion and relegation in 1892. The Southern League continued as a separate competition for years, with a few teams defecting to the Football League before an en-masse defection in 1921 to form the Third-Division. The Football League then raided the Northern League and the Third Division was regionalized until 1959. The open pyramid was implemented in 1987, 99 years after the formation of a The Football League, although the Northern League opted out for several seasons losing two places on the pyramid in the process. I look forward to the US implementing an open pyramid in the same sort of timescale. #ussocceropenpyramid2095