We've established one thing, if nothing else, in all of this… what’s good for college football is good TV ratings. To that end, NO, the absence of an SEC team is NOT good for college football because I believe you’ve lost a large contingent of southern football “fans” who won’t tune in to watch Michigan and Washington play. There is no real doubt that they are the two teams that SHOULD be playing for the championship, and it is a good championship game,but I suspect a large number of southern eyeballs won’t be watching “yankee football.”
Taken a step further, if my suspicions are true, TV numbers will again bear out that SEC teams bring viewers, and therefore the future playoffs and rankings need SEC teams in order to be profitable. This will perpetuate what we’ve already seen happening and more playoff spots will go to these SEC teams. Tv Ratings are far more important than on field results.
Long term, I think thats bad for college football, as it will further separate the haves and have nots, but I don’t see them sacrificing the near term revenues over that. If they start losing viewers later, they’ll address it later… That said, this year overall is a throw away. All sorts of things happened that have never happened before and won’t ever happen again. All of these “unsavory” results will be fixed by the new playoff structure and once they’ve gone about perverting the new structure, they’ll sell us on another new system. Eventually we will come full circle to a system that selects made for media matchups again. Lather, rinse, repeat.