Although it seems like most college football fans and coaches (Pete Carroll) and Obama himself seem to care more about the legitimacy of winning, don't forget that the pawns in these games are students, enrolled at Universities. They take classes five days a week. If they didn't take classes, they couldn't play on the football team. Most of them miss lots of classes anyway because of traveling (flying from California to Indiana to play Notre Dame?) and usually have football commitments that get in the way of making any serious progress in their academic life, but when they graduate, 95% of these athletes will need to get a non-athletic job, and their college training is what prepares them to do that. Though we remain college football fans our entire life, these players are done in about four years and they have to move on.

So do you want to make it harder on them by having them travel into January? The price of winning playoff games would be missing more classes. The championship teams would be traveling around and playing football games and practicing constantly while they should be in class. These big school teams practice all year long, so do you want to exacerbate the pressures and stress on these players by scheduling MORE games into the second semester and during the FINALS of first semester?

Leave playoffs for the pros. Let these students get back to class so they might actually learn something.

Are you actually saying that football players at the top football factories are actually legitimate students? Wow. That's the funniest thing I've read all day. We wouldn't want these "students" to miss any classes. They might not get their degrees in communications or general studies. God, that would be a tragedy.

AllThatJazz:

Are you actually saying that football players at the top football factories are actually legitimate students? Wow. That's the funniest thing I've read all day. We wouldn't want these "students" to miss any classes. They might not get their degrees in communications or general studies. God, that would be a tragedy.

You have no idea what you're talking about. The "football factories" vary quite a bit in this regard, based partly on the integrity of the coaches and ADs. And even at the biggest football powers most of the players know they have no shot at pro football.

(A year or two back ESPN carried a retrospective on Penn State's 1987 Fiesta Bowl upset of heavily favored Miami for the pre-BCS championship. The PSU quarterback never even tried for an NFL career an ended up putting his very real degree to work on Wall Street. Joe Paterno has *never* treated his players' academic careers as a joke.)

There's also the extra strain placed on college players' less than fully mature bodies by a lengthier season, which is by no means trivial. The marginal risk of a career-ending injury rises with every additional game. It hardly seems fair to me given that they won't get a penny of the mountains of money the playoffs would rake in. Good luck trying to persuade the schools and conferences to cut games from the regular season and cut into their TV revenue in order to make room for the playoffs.