Iowa is hard to run against. Should be a low scoring defensive battle.
It's a great matchup. Best run attack this year vs. great run defense.
And yes the mid-majors are in the conversation. But they aren't on a level playing field. You'll never see a George Mason in CFB.
Right, but the point is, the mid-majors used to never be in the conversation at all. It's changed so much since the 90s. The BCS enabled the mid-majors to at least complain about the situation, and the mainstream media's starting to go with the times.
The bowl games are less legitimate, because they are played so long after the regular season is over.
The BCS games, yes. But bowl season starts up in less than 2 weeks. For the majority of teams, it's a reward for having a decent season, and a decent way to pocket some extra cash. Also, the bowl season helped mantain inter-conference and regional rivalries. The BCS really was just designed to schedule good games during January and to schedule a "title game." I agree a playoff season should be implemented, but at the same time I disagree with people that bowl games are meaningless. There are too many, but they've been a unique tradition of D1 football for a long time.
Anyway, I strongly think a 16-game playoff is eventually the way they'll go. They might do +1 for years, but a 4-game playoff means that in a situation with no undefeated teams, you'll have 2 major conferences that are left out. If you do a 6-game playoff, you may get complaints about selections about best-record teams that didn't win their conference championship. If you go 8-game playoff, you'll get heartburn over the selection of 2nd tier teams. Each solution will create a new problem.
If you go 16-game playoff, yes, you'll have not-so-great teams in the playoffs, but you'll also have something like the first week of March Madness where a low level team will upset a top 5. After all, remember that the top 16 teams usually represent the top 2 or 3 teams in any given conference. And conference rivalries are still conference rivalries. For week one, you can seed teams according to region and take advantage of that. There will be high regional interest, since they would come so soon after the conference championships, just as in D1 basketball.
Will it make everybody happy? No, for one thing, if they try to keep all the bowls, it'll be impossible to adequately fill all the seats in the lower tiers, since team fans would have to make travelling plans again and again. Also, it'll be a challenge to sell to the TV networks, since each one probably want to get dominant rights for the playoff series (like what CBS has with March Madness.) However, it's also a challenge for any one or two networks to deploy that many broadcasting crews for all the bowls, given the travel and need for top tier name brand recognition.
But the advertising money will be huge, and possibly it may eventually make D1 football the most popular sport in the country. That sounds outlandish, but you can imagine college football madness combined with March Madness? The gambling alone will be off the charts.
They'll be a really, really tough matchup against any team.
