What’s more interesting than football playoff games? Football fans like me love to watch football playoff games whether its college or professional. The atmosphere of the games is intense and exciting. Teams battle it out for 60 minutes in hope to reach the top and win it all. They play all season so they could secure a spot in the playoff picture. The way the college playoff is set up with the bowls and NFL playoff is set up with the eight divisions is a bad idea and should be changed. My audience would be to all the football fans and the committees of both college and professional football. My purpose of this paper is to show fans that the way football playoffs are setup today isn’t a really good way to set it and I plan to evaluate this through three criteria’s: corruption, unfairness, and how it hurts the sport.
One of the criteria’s, unfairness, happens in both college and professional football but most people oversee it. The way the NFL playoffs are set up today, there are eight divisions: four in the AFC and four in the NFC. In each conference, the division winner with the best record is awarded home-field advantage throughout the playoffs. The division winner with the best record, as well as the division winner with the second-best record, receive first-round byes and host a divisional (second-round) playoff game. The other two division winners in the conference host wild-card games. Then, of the 12 remaining teams in the conference, the two with the best records play wild-card games on the road. The problem with that is now the divisions is too uneven. Teams that have a losing record still make the playoff because their division sucks. Last year the Seattle Seahawks made the playoffs with a record of 7-9. The playoff setup gives away the chance of good teams making the playoffs. For example, this season the NFC North division has three great teams that include the Green Bay Packers, Detroit Lions, and Chicago Bears. It lowers the chance of these teams to make the playoffs because their division is harder. The AFC West division includes Kansas City Chiefs, San Diego Chargers, Oakland Raiders, and Denver Broncos. This season the Oakland Raiders have the top seed with a record of 6-4. The Detroit Lions on the other hand have a record of 7-3 and are third seed in their division. The level of difficulty in each division is too uneven to keep the NFL playoff bracket setup the way it is now.
Unfairness in college football isn’t as easy to spot but it definitely does occur. Ever since the creation of BCS Cartel, Division 1-A college football has become more about money and revenue and less about the fairness and equal competition expected by football fans. In an article written by Mark L. Shurtleff, he says, “In a letter to the Department of Justice, 21 economists called the BCS a "mathematically dubious rating system," that shields major-conference schools from competition. It systematically denies thousands of athletes a fair chance to prove themselves the "Best in the Nation."” If you think about it and look at the past few years then you would realize that what Mark is saying is accurate and true. The BCS gives unfair competitive advantage to teams in six elite Automatic Qualifying (AQ) Conferences so they can get richer at the expense of the rest. Since 1998, the non-AQ teams have been allowed to play only seven times in the 114 slots open in the 57 BCS Bowl games receiving only 14 percent of the $1 billion payout. University of Florida President Bernie Machen said in the article, "When I was at Utah, our athletics budget was around $20 to $22 million per year. Our budget here is $85.5 million . . . and the major difference is the bowl revenue and TV revenue . . . but all SEC schools got the same amount of money that we got. And Utah could beat a lot of SEC schools. That's the unfairness." The BCS and the way its setup is demoralizing the sport. In the 2010 season, 10th-ranked Boise State (one loss) from the non-AQ Western Athletic Conference was denied a BCS Bowl while three two-loss AQ teams got to play and score millions of dollars. Another example is in 2008, undefeated Utah of the non-AQ Mountain West Conference was denied a shot at the championship because the cabal required AQ one-loss teams to play each other. If these don’t strike you as unfair, then nothing will.
work cited: http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/viewpoints/articles/2011/10/01/20111001con-bcs-shurtleff.html