Football playoff comments that boggle my mind

Right off the top, let me say that I'm in favor of a 16-team college football playoff with conference champions and at-large teams selected by a committee. (Sound familiar?) It would use the current bowls, with lesser bowls rotating through first- and second-round games and the top bowls (let's say Rose, Sugar, Orange, Fiesta, Cotton ... and Gator and Chick-Fil-A for the sake of discussion) hosting the semifinals and finals.

The smaller bowls that don't host first- and second-round games could hold their bowls with teams that don't make the playoff, sort of like an NIT. As a bonus, they'd probably have better teams and games than they do now with the ninth-place team from the Big Ten against the seventh team from the ACC or whatever the matchup is.

I'd go into more detail, but I really want to get into this article by Andy Staples in which he talked to nine college presidents about playoffs and different scenarios. It included two statements that were so profoundly stupid as to boggle the mind.

The first is from Nebraska chancellor Harvey Perlman.

Perlman, one of the members of the BCS Presidential Oversight Committee, disagrees. He sees no benefit in a playoff, and he worries any additional television revenue gained might be lost again in the next round of media rights negotiations if the playoff causes interest in the regular season to wane. "I've given all the arguments why I don't want to see a playoff even if it's a plus-one," Perlman said. "More recently, I've just been asking the question, 'What benefit does it have?' I can't find one. This notion that now we'll have an undisputed national champion is a pipe dream. We're not going to have an undisputed national champion. We'll have an undisputed winner of a playoff."

In FBS football, if you lose one game, the only way you get to play for a national title is if enough teams also lose one so that there are fewer than two undefeated teams, and then only if you're in a BCS conference and get a lot of help. And if you lose two, forget it. If you're lucky, you might win your conference and go to a BCS bowl that no one cares about because everyone is fixated on the title game.

Meanwhile, I saw my first NCAA basketball tournament bubble watch in December, based solely on non-conference schedules ... or what in football they call "Alabama versus Chudley State." Do too much of that in basketball, and you might hear those three fateful letters ... N-I-T. Right, Virginia Tech?

And for the past three weeks, the interest has ramped up because everyone is trying to play their way into the tournament ... and everyone not in the Ivy League has that chance.

As for the "undisputed winner of a playoff"? Really? The New York Giants, St. Louis Cardinals and University of Connecticut would like to discuss whether you dispute their championships.

But wait, there's more! This is from Kansas State president Kirk Schulz.

Schulz, who took over at Kansas State in 2009, doesn't fall far from Perlman on the issue. "My comment on that always is, if we have an eight-team playoff, the ninth-place team goes, 'I got screwed.' There's always going to be some sense in college football of somebody not quite getting a fair deal," Schulz said. "I like the bowl system. I'm not sure it's as broken as everybody likes to think it is. Personally, I'm happy to have us tweak it a little bit."

Someone's going to complain that they got screwed? No crap! On Sunday, we're going to hear people say that No. 69 got screwed! But in the case of a football tournament, I'd rather have No. 9 (or No. 17 in my tournament) complaining instead of No. 3, especially if No. 3 actually won something and No. 2 didn't. (And yes, Erick, it was always a done deal.)

Hopefully, these guys are better at running colleges than college sports.