Quote:
Originally Posted by Skipaway
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.
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You didn't answer my question. You claimed that the NCAA basketball tourney hurts regular season interest. But there's no hard evidence of that, only some hypothesis including the one you give here. Good job theorycrafting, but I'm not buying it.
And who says you have to do away with the other bowl games? With an 8 team playoff go ahead and keep all the other bowls, you're really not changing the landscape that much other than that 2 teams will play an extra bowl game and 2 teams will play 2 extra bowl games. So 4 spots are taken away from other teams, who cares? They're going to be 6-6 teams anyway. Don't tell me that then the bowl games don't matter, because they already don't matter. They're exhibition games anyway, at least with a playoff a few more games matter a bit more. Plenty of teams are still playing for something, so, according to you, they're still generating interest.
As for reducing teams, how do you reconcile the fact that college football already has more than 100 teams yet has
tons of interest? College fanbases are built differently than professional sports teams. By removing 70% of the teams from the viewing base, you're leaving tons of money on the table. College sports are popular but really only super popular at the top level. How many people watch the lower divisions in any sport?