I’m an odd duck and I now it. Playoff titles when they involve more and more teams mean little to me. Not nothing, but no where near as meaningful as regular season championships, imho. Viewership and dollars tell me I’m the odd man out. But it’s how I feel. This new system will result in a 2nd or 3rd place conference team winning a “national championship”. Nope.Not right. Never will be.
But it will generate $$$.
I hate expanded playoffs in all sports. Expanding the playoffs doesn’t give you more meaningful games. It just gives you more games to sell to fans and TV audiences as being important. Being the best team across an entire regular season schedule is more representative of being a “true” champion than being the hottest team for a couple of weeks. Eventually leagues will just start putting everyone into the playoffs, and even the first rounds of the playoffs will start to feel no different than regular season games. I mean hell, the NBA is trying to create the playoffs
within the regular season because they’ve devalued it so much. If over half the league wasn’t in the playoffs, which take way too long anyway, you wouldn’t have to create ways to trick people into watching regular season games. Because the regular season would actually mean something.
Baseball’s original wild card playoff system had it right I think. 30 teams, 8 make the playoffs. 6 division winners and 2 wild cards. No byes, no stupid play-in games, no 1 game shootouts, just the best teams in the league that year battling for 1 extra month.
People claim adding playoff teams makes the games mean more, when all they’re really doing is shifting “meaningfulness” from the regular season into the playoffs. Further devaluing the regular season, and making it even more enticing to further expand the playoffs. It’s a never ending cycle that only exists to pad execs pockets.