Florida President reveals SEC play-off plan
The SEC will be pushing a four-team play-off plan to determine future National Champions, Florida’s Chancellor told a press conference at this year’s SEC Spring Meetings.
Dr Bernie Machen of Florida – talking down the road from UF’s campus in Gainseville in Destin – said at a press conference: “We want a four-team play-off”.
He added: “I would be amazed if it wasn’t a four-team play-off with semifinals in the bowl system and a final championship game bid out separately.”
Machen added that the SEC would be pushing for the four best teams in college football to play each other – regardless of whether they’d won the conference championship or not. Last year that means even if Georgia HAD caught some passes and won the Championship game against LSU, they probably wouldn’t have made the SEC Championship Game. Going 0-2 early in the season hurt, folks.
He told the press conference that things were expected to be finalized by the end of June. Machen also serves on the BCS Oversight Committee, so he’d be an expert.
What’s also interesting is that the Committee at the Big XII are also pumping for a four-team play-off, meaning that the pressure on the NCAA essentially to go with College Football’s version of a ‘Final Four’ (please God, can this be the case?) is virtually unstoppable- regardless of what the Big Ten is going to say (We’re sure they’ll say: ‘Love the four-team play-off, but remember our Rose Bowl’).
THE BOTTOM LINE: The SEC is going to do what is in its interests, and going for the four-team play-off ignoring conference championships is clearly what is in its interests. Having said that, it does degrade the conference championships a little – and puts into question – what happens to the Rose Bowl or Sugar Bowl in all of this?
And this won’t hurt the SEC and Big XII’s new bowl, either, will it. Or, as Machen told reporters: “It can’t hurt”.
If play-off format had existed this season, we would have plumped for LSU, Alabama, Oregon and Oklahoma State. Why OSU and not Arkansas? OSU may have lost to Iowa State, but it still beat Oklahoma and everyone else.