Farnsworth How many teams, how many rounds? Four teams and two rounds? Eight teams and three rounds? Sixteen and four? Thirty two and five? What is the magic number that will eliminate poo flinging?

I'd vote for 16 teams, but eight would work.

There are too many teams, too many conferences, and too many games against weak opponents to have a legitimate Champion. No system will ever work.

That's not true. Or, if it's true, you can say it about every sport. Does the Super Bowl/World Series/NBA Finals/etc. claim the "legitimate champion," whatever that is? Yes and no. Is the team that wins necessarily the best team? No. Are they the legitimate champs? Yes. They won the playoff system, where everybody who was even plausibly deserving had a chance.

Yes, if you pick eight teams the ninth best complains, and if you pick 16 the 17th best complains, and we've seen in basketball that if you pick the 65 best, No. 66 whines. But so what. If we took the top 16 teams in NCAA football, no matter what poll or computer ranking or whatever determined it, I feel pretty confident that, somewhere in there, you'd find the best team in the country. The bubble teams left out could claim that they deserved to be one of the top 16, but I'm sure they'd have no real claim to being No. 1. So: Play better next time. Arguments at the margins are for losers.

With the playoff system, everyone has their chance to keep winning and be crowned champ. If you lose, it's because you lose on the field, not because of the biases of voters who can rig the polls at the end of the season to see the teams they want to see. No reasonable person walked away from, say, the 2006 World Series grumbling that the Cardinals weren't "legitimate" champs, that the real champs were the Mets or somebody. If you play it on the field, the fans are satisfied. That's how you run a sport. Every sport in the world knows this, except NCAA Div 1-A football.

If you take away the games which pit a big name school against a hapless opponent, you are taking large chunks of money away from the smaller schools. This is as close to revenue sharing as college football gets. Do you really want to take that away?

Yes. I think that with the minds of 120 or so of our nation's finest universities at work, we could probably scratch together a revenue-sharing system that does not involve smaller, slower athletes going to get their asses beat in by larger, faster athletes. Yes, I want to take that away.

Seriously, as someone else has already said, let's stop pretending the national championship can ever have any meaning. Because it can't. The logistical requirements of the game make it impossible. Deal with it.

Except for the fact that that's not true, that's true. You're the guy at the job who says "We do it this way because we've always done it that way" and "We can't do it that way because we've never done it that way."

You're that guy. Deal with it.

Notorious W.E.S. Even a playoff wouldn't determine who is best.

So what?

Just one team would win that one particular playoff tournament.

That is generally how tournaments work, yes.

Certainly no one contends that if you have a playoff, whoever wins would automatically win it again if you replayed the whole thing because they are the best.

That's right. No one contends that. So what?

To determine who is best between say USC and LSU you'd have to match them up head to head in at least a best of 7, probably more.

I think they'd need to play at least 250,000 times to get a true sample. Fortunately, no one really cares who's best in some Platonic sense. We want to see them play each other.

This is a concept that's incredibly not difficult to understand. We are football fans. We want to see football games between the best football teams to determine the football champion. This happens in every single division of every single sport, except this one. Where is the ambiguity here?

The Winner Is Not The Best. That should ruffle the feathers of the nerds.

Dog bites man. You exagerrate the nerdness of those around you.

RunRun23 King, shouldn't, uh, California be on that list too?

No. Cal never passed Hawaii in any poll or ranking. They started higher, and when they started losing, they sank below the Warriors for good.

Horrible officiating could be the angle for the story of every NFL game. I feel like at this point it's just a part of the game, like the shape of the ball.