Quote:
Originally Posted by dudeosu
People keep saying that, but what proof is there? Yeah the tournament is more popular than the regular season, but that's not necessarily an indication that the tournament has hurt the regular season in any way. Really, the same could be said for the football and the bowls.
Doesn't reducing the number of teams hurt interest? What teams would you even pick?
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To generate interest, you need teams to be playing for something. In football leagues around the world you have teams fighting against relegation, and that's something. You have all those league cups or what not as a secondary prize to fight for also. Even in leagues with blown up playoffs like NBA there is the fight for the last playoff spot.
If you have a 16 team playoff system instead of the current bowl system, suddenly the number of teams fighting for something in the regular season decreased by a lot. Right now at least being eligible to a bowl is romanticized to be worth something, and teams obviously are willing to go to bowls even when they are not making money off those horrible bowls.
And reducing team number is going to help interest from the TV contract point of view. It would hurt interest overall from the stadium attendance point of view, because fewer teams are going to be in the top tiers and those cut out would suffer in attendance.
For the sport overall, there is no doubt having fewer teams helps, and that's why you don't see 100 MLB teams. You'd have talent too diluted and too many bad match ups.
Picking what teams to be in the super league is just another political issue, like playoffs and BCS. It's actually not that hard. You can have Big 10, SEC, Big 12, and Pac 12 deciding that they don't want to play with anybody else anymore, with a blessing of some super college football channel deal.
The smaller the division, the smaller the problem of strength of schedule discrepancies and the easier to decide championships, be it something like BCS or playoffs.