Yes, the regular season was compelling and fun. This is a fact. It also was somewhat meaningless.
It was compelling and fun because you didn't KNOW at the time which losses would be fatal to NC aspirations and which would be survivable.
Notre Dame didn't win a national championship in 1993 despite beating champ Florida State.
That FSU@ND game was the first time ESPN went on the road in what became their College Gameday program. You are correct, of course, that FSU ended up winning the NC despite losing in South Bend but there are multiple things that I think you are overlooking here:
- I don't automatically agree that FSU winning the NC was the wrong result. Sure, they lost to ND but ND's loss to BC was MUCH worse. FSU's loss to ND was a close road loss to a top-echelon team. ND's loss to BC was nothing of the kind.
- The atmosphere for that ND/FSU game was intense or as you put it, compelling and fun because nobody KNEW that FSU could lose and recover. Once FSU lost they lost control of their own destiny and needed a monumental upset of ND by BC to get back into the race.
- The fact that FSU needed ND to lose to BC is why not just the FSU/ND game but also every other regular season game played by the contenders that year had an intensity that we just don't have for regular season games anymore*
*Intensity of regular season games circa 1993:
I remember this one REALLY well because I was a freshman at Ohio State in the fall of 1993 and the Buckeyes were in the thick of the NC race right up until Cooper's annual loss to Michigan.
The Buckeyes started out at "only" #17 because they had only gone 8-3-1 the previous year, hadn't beaten Michigan since 1987 (Earle Bruce's last year), and hadn't won the conference and been to the Rose Bowl in almost a decade (1984 season). They started out 8-0 and climbed to #3 before tying the Badgers in Madison to drop to #5. When the poll came out after the tie with Wisconsin I remember consulting my preseason magazine to check the schedules of the teams ahead of us to mentally determine which games I needed them to lose. Also, Wisconsin had already lost two weeks earlier to a bad Minnesota team so the Buckeyes still were in the driver's seat as far as the Rose Bowl was concerned. The top of the poll after the Wisconsin tie:
- 9-0 FSU: Still had to play #2 ND and #7 Florida as well as whatever Bowl they got
- 9-0 Notre Dame: Still had to play #1 FSU as well as whatever Bowl they got
- 7-1 Miami: I figured the Buckeyes would leapfrog them if they kept winning because a loss is worse than a tie, right?
- 9-0 Nebraska: Still had to play #17 Oklahoma and whatever bowl they got.
- 8-0-1 Ohio State
In my mind it was simple:
- Florida over FSU
- FSU over Notre Dame
- Oklahoma over Nebraska
Ohio State wins out, wins the NC.
That made ALL of FSU's, Notre Dame's, Miami's, and Nebraska's games compelling to me. To a somewhat lesser extent the games of teams close behind Ohio State were ALSO compelling to me. I had a rooting interest in ALL of those regular season games.
As we become more and more like CBB that is lost. I've had this discussion with
@ELA before and he finds the MEAC Tournament fascinating because it determines which MEAC team goes to the NCAAT but I've never looked at it that way. To my way of thinking, two crappy teams are going to play in the MEACCG and one of them will win thus snagging an auto-bid to the NCAAT. Why on earth would I care which crappy MEAC team gets that bid?
Even when Ohio State has had high-level CBB teams in contention for #1 seeds (ya know, before Chris Holtmann) I never really cared much about how the other high-end teams from other conferences were doing because I don't see it as impacting my team much. In football there were always less spots so it mattered a LOT to me who won the #1 vs #2 FSU @ Notre Dame game and I REALLY rooted for upsets because I felt like my team needed those upsets to clear a path. In CBB I just don't feel like I have a reason to care even when UNC and Dook are both top-5 and play each other. As an Ohio State fan, even if Ohio State is also top-5 and competing with those two for a #1 seed I just don't care. An upset loss by UNC or Dook in that situation does help tOSU but it isn't the same as say #1 Bama losing a football game because in CFB there is ONLY one #1 seed. Ohio State can't get it unless Alabama loses so I have an intense interest in rooting for Tennessee or Auburn or whoever to knock off the Tide. In CBB there are four #1 seeds and somebody has to lose the UNC/Dook game so what difference does it make?
Playoff expansion is going to make me feel the same way about non-B1G CFB games. I might watch but I will not have an intense rooting interest in cheering for Tennessee and LSU to take out Bama or whatever.
The reason the BCS was created and then the playoffs was because the bowl system was a completely idiotic way to crown a national champion.
You can call it idiotic all you want but the REASON that CFB had the best regular season in sports was BECAUSE of the Polls and Bowls system of crowning a NC.
All of these things are going to have tradeoffs, the issue is what we are trading off.
Yep. With a 12-team playoff there will be 11 hyper-intense games because they are single-elimination and thus very high stakes. All the games before that are just about getting there and all the power-league teams are going to realistically know that they are in at 10-2 or better so they effectively have two mulligans. The intensity of regular season games is gone. So you've traded hundreds of intense games for 11.
On that end, the lack of certainty is what made it all feel unfair and somewhat rigged. That it didn't really matter what the results of games were, as opposed to the "eye test," which further favored the teams that already had all the advantages.
This statement is, at best, disingenuous. Game results DID matter. Sure, some results got overridden. That HAS to happen because you are going to end up with multiple 1-loss teams. I remember seeing a ND shirt after the 1989 season that had a convoluted list of results of ND over ___ over ___ over ____ . . . over Miami, thus Notre Dame should be NC.
The results of the games absolutely did matter just not necessarily in the same way that YOU thought they should have mattered. I always disagreed with the fact that losing early was better than losing late for example. Whatever you thought about it, it is completely ridiculous to say "it didn't really matter what the results of the games were". That suggests that a 3-9 Michigan would have been ranked ahead of a 10-2 Purdue. That is simply untrue. Some games mattered more than others and some results had to be plowed under because you always had situations like the Tx/TxTech/OU year in the B12. Texas beat Oklahoma and Oklahoma beat TxTech and Tech beat Texas. There is no way to square that circle without making the result of one of those games "not matter". No matter how you rank them, one of those teams is going to be ranked ahead of a team that they lost to.
We will have to agree to disagree about that. Middle aged men wishing things were how they used to be is not the best test to what the fans want. I'd say nearly every fan everywhere would want an easier path to the playoff as opposed to a harder one for their particular team. In general, my theory is that:
- Fans lose interest when there is no realistic chance for their team to participate
- Fans lose interest when the results of games have little meaning
Funny you should mention this because it is EXACTLY the reason that non-helmet superfans are walking away. They don't have games that matter anymore. They don't have obtainable goals that anyone cares about anymore.
In 2000 Purdue beat Michigan and they were lucky enough that neither tOSU nor PSU were all that good and they ended up going to the Rose Bowl. That was a meaningful goal, a goal that the "big kids" usually kept to themselves but PU was able to swoop in and grab one. Now they can't and to the extent that they can nobody cares anymore and to the extent that they do it will only be because it is a CFP quarter-final or whatever and PU will almost always be a prohibitive underdog even if they somehow get there and even if they pull that upset that just gets them a tougher team a week later. You are trying to sub in "made the playoff" for "made the Rose Bowl" and the Purdue fan has already told you that it just isn't the same thing because the Rose Bowl was a destination not a journey. The playoff is a journey.
