College football playoff? What a goofy idea

Those dumb college basketball people. What do they know?

Every year, they waste their time with a postseason playoff to decide a champion. How silly. They have this thing they call the NCAA tournament and invite 65 teams to participate. For two weeks they have regional play at various sites, and the teams that survive go to something called the Final Four.

CBS covers it all — in high definition, no less. There are office pools in which people try to predict winners. The tournament generates a good bit of excitement and, from what I understand, a good bit of money for the NCAA.

Of course, when it’s all over, there is only one team left; one champion decided on the court. Who came up with such a crazy idea?

But let’s not take the basketball folks to task. Wait until you hear this: College baseball, college lacrosse, college soccer and all those other college sports have playoffs and tournaments to decide champions. And here’s the kicker: Even professional sports, high school sports and youth sports decide their champions with playoffs and tournaments. Is everybody nuts?

Well, no. Fortunately, major-college football knows how to do it. Earlier this week, somebody had the wild idea of suggesting college football have some sort of championship playoff. Sure, it might have produced more interest in the sport and had television networks scrambling to pay out bigger bucks for the rights to carry the games. But what about the sacred bowl system?

The original thought was to have four teams, but some feared that might have led to an eight-team or even a 16-team playoff. Egad, then college football would be just like everybody else. Can’t have that.

Fortunately, wiser heads prevailed and the playoff idea was ditched. The Bowl Championship Series — which is not a series at all — will continue. Not only that, college football agreed to sanction two more bowls, the St. Petersburg Bowl in Florida and the Congressional Bowl in Washington, D.C.

That means we will have 34 bowl games next season on television; 68 schools will go bowling. That’s a lot of 6-6 and 7-5 teams being rewarded for their “excellent” seasons. Isn’t that great? More bowl games and no playoff. The Shreveport, La., and Boise, Idaho, chambers of commerce can breath sighs of relief — their cities’ bowl games are safe.

When is the rest of the sports world going to wake up and follow college football’s lead? Champions should be decided by people voting in polls and by computer rankings. That’s the only way to decide a true champion.

Come on, basketball folks, get with it. Drop this stupid tournament stuff and go with polls and computers.You could have basketball bowls everywhere and, heck, you could have at least 70 of them.

When basketball does it, other sports are sure to follow. Then we won’t have to worry about those goofy playoffs.