A 8 team playoff in college football? No thanks.

What I'm about to say might shock you.

I think a playoff would be bad for college football.

There, I said it. Now let me explain. I must preface it by saying if our only options were a playoff or the BCS, I'd take a playoff any day of the week. Fortunately we live in a free world and the only time we're pigeonholed into making an either/or decision in this world is when we're electing the next leader of the free world. So yay America.

With that out of the way, a playoff system would be bad for College Football. The frustration with the current system is never ending. The powers that be can tweak the system year after year, but new challenges arise that question the effectiveness of the selection method almost every college football season. The only time the BCS works is when there are clearly two teams that are better than the rest of the field like in 2005 when Texas and USC were head and shoulders better than anyone else. In any other situation the BCS is destined to fail. It's clear something needs to be done, but my friends, a playoff is a bad option.

My reasoning is simple: College Football is the greatest sport in the world because every regular season game matters. Every week your national championship hopes are on the line. If we had an eight team playoff this year, Texas' loss to Texas Tech wouldn't be nearly as heartbreaking because it's likely if Texas runs the table they would be one of the 8 teams selected for a playoff. Without it, I'm trying to erase the last 90 seconds of last weekend's classic from my memory because Texas now needs a fair amount of help to get a chance to play for a national title.

A playoff devalues the regular season. The more teams you add to the playoff, the more that fact is true. The more that fact is true, the more College Football becomes College Basketball, a sport with an exciting post season, but a regular season that doesn't mean anything. The NCAA tournament is one of my favorite months of the year. The College Football regular season are my four favorite months of the year. Why would you want to take away the best element of a sport in favor of a playoff system that would still be problematic.

Why would a playoff be problematic? Because there is no perfect way to implement it. There are two schools of thought on a playoff. Use a system like BCS rankings to rank the top eight teams in America and those eight teams make the playoff. That would seem to be the most fair policy. But fairness isn't important to the conference commissioners, money is important. Have you watched ACC or Big East football the past few years? It's pretty likely we could go a stretch of years where no ACC or Big East team finishes in the top 8 and those teams get shut out of the playoff payday. So why not just agree to split the money between the conferences regardless of who is in the playoff? Because what incentive is there for the SEC or Big 12 to share money with the other conferences when they could have as many as three or four teams in the playoff in any given season? So you'd have to put a limit on how many teams from a conference can make the playoff, similar to the current format of the BCS where only two teams from a conference can make a BCS Bowl, and you run the risk of one of the eight best teams in America not getting a shot to play for the title.

The other playoff scenario involves the conference champions of the six BCS conferences and two at larges, but again that's going to shut out some pretty good teams. Right now, do you honestly believe North Carolina or Georgia Tech or West Virginia could beat any of the top four teams in the Big 12? Could any of those teams beat Georgia or LSU, who aren't nationally elite teams but still solid? I'm not sure they could. Right now, Oklahoma would be left out of the playoffs in this scenario and that team would probably hang 60 on the ACC or Big East champ.

So an eight team playoff system creates a new set of problem and runs the risk of eliminating the best quality of college football so we need to come up with a better solution. A plus one system or possibly a four team tournament would be the best option for College Football right now. It's the best sport on Earth, let's keep it that way.