Another legend retires

I've begun to wonder, why do we have to have a playoff?  Play your games and then be done and move to the next season.

True, I no longer chase that brass ring.  It was fun and challenging, but I've moved on to other challenges.  One of the things that I always liked about college ball was everyone played the season, then got a reward as a bowl game, and the 'champion' was something totally unrelated and arbitrary to the season.... It just added intrigue to the off season leading up to signing day.

Dead serious. I don't know about Coach Woodall but I played in the days before playoffs. Not everybody got a trophy, just teams that won their conference. Winning your conference doesn't mean anything anymore. You could make an argument that a playoff system that may take half a conference's teams is more "Everybody gets a trophy" than the old days. 

I've come around to pondering this same question.

Everybody's playoff system is jacked up.  I know my state's is.  I don't know what yours looks like, but I guarantee that it is messed up in its own way, too.

Now that the FBS has one, it's made the bowl games meaningless and turned every team who's not in the playoff hunt into a failure.  Top players "opting out" of bowl games, or even the regular season when their team is out of the playoff hunt, would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.  Now it's common and no one bats an eye.

Our state wants the money, though.  Parents and kids want that shot at state, which realistically only a few schools have each year.

At least we're not HS basketball where the regular season is considered completely meaningless because every single team makes the post-season tournament and only those games "matter."

I don't think the argument against a playoff is so much about the best teams not playing for the championship.  In every state, you usually have a few teams who are head and shoulders above everybody else and they almost always wind up meeting in the playoffs.

I think a lot of it comes down to the idea that it diminishes the value of the regular season and local accomplishments.  Winning a conference used to be a huge deal.  Now it's really not worth much more than maybe a better playoff seed.

Meanwhile, only a few teams will realistically ever have a shot at competing for state in each class, while all the other teams who qualify are destined to go out on a loss.  You can win your conference, then get stomped in the first round of the playoffs and your season goes from being a success to being a bitter disappointment.

In our state, they used to have bowl games for the postseason, similar to what you have in the FBS, and an AP poll would crown the champions.  That was before my time, and I'm not really a fan of AP polls crowning disputed champions, but the idea of the season ending with some successful teams getting recognized with a fun bowl game was a nice little football-specific tradition that we've lost at all levels now.

Do we really even need a state champion?  Conference champion makes sense: you play each other in the season and these are local rivalries, so the top dog has intrinsic value.  Competing to see who's better in the state, though... why?  That's kind of an arbitrary, weird thing if you think about it.  I'm in Tennessee.  I don't know much about those other schools  that are 9 hours away in Memphis--I'm literally geographically closer to Canada than to those schools.  Why should I care more about them than the schools with loads of tradition near me who happen to be in VA?

Not saying you shouldn't care about winning state championships or celebrate getting the ring/trophy/whatever, nor am I saying those teams aren't great and deserving.  All I'm saying is that if they didn't exist, the game would still be just as great and the stuff that's more immediate and realistic for most teams would matter more.

I feel like as our state has expanded and expanded the playoff system to get more and more schools in and create more and more state champions, the local rivalries, tradition, and even interest in the game of HS football has diminished each time.

Compromise....only conference champs get in playoffs.

Old fogies get there conference title being important and the young bucks get to chase the state ring

Agreed.  I was going to say in reply to CS 's post regarding "compromise" that many if not most playoff systems have evolved from exactly that same set up.  Once the playoff championship became the end destination, the number of entrants will grow and grow for various (and sometimes valid) reasons.  One of the most common and prevalent is simply often two of the best teams would come from the same conference/district/region/league whatever designation you give it. 

Once winning the playoff is introduced as the endgame, expansion is inevitable because winning that becomes the de facto goal. 

Also, as fantom mentions, this is much more of a "everyone gets a trophy" mindset, since making the playoffs can be viewed as an accomplishment (trophy) and many more teams achieve that than winning their district. 

I hate the fact that teams lose in the play-offs and still advance. That's particularly prevalent around here in Basketball, but its coming.
They keep adding rounds to the play-offs here. So much so that they hand out first round byes so they can fill the brackets. Some of our Bowl teams played 15 games. It might increase to 16 soon.
It's out of control but will only get worse.

Ha! Right. That "culture" BS has just about worn me out.

Not if the entrance to your playoffs are district related (first in district/district runner up) etc.   Of course that leads to other issues so there you go. 

The playoffs have expanded dramatically over the years, some say they've expanded too much.  Money really didn't have much to do with it, though. 

When I first got here in 1977 the playoffs were highly selective. There were three classifications divided into four geographic regions, which were divided into four districts (What other states call conferences). Only district winners made the playoffs. Some rural schools complained that there was a wide disparity in the enrollments within each classification, making  it hard for the smaller schools to get into the playoffs. The bigger complaint was that the districts are unbalanced. In our region, three of the four districts had nine or ten schools but one had only five. So, while 9-1 district runners-up were left out, a 4-6 or even 3-7 team could win that small district and get in. 

To alleviate the situation the state divided, for football only, each region in half, creating six classifications.  They still only took four teams per region. District winners were in automatically then the brackets were based on power points. 

Eventually, because there were still disparities, complaints led the state to double the number of playoff berths in each region. 

So, even if the playoffs have opened up too much it wasn't done for money. 

We play 10 games, 5 versus random teams known as freedom games. Quite often it is difficult if not impossible to get teams to play you if you are very good or very bad. So these games are usually the Very good versus very bad, and then the mediocre vs. each other. We travel all over hell and back trying to get these games in the first five weeks. No fans show up as there is no interest in the games and often the games aren’t competitive. Then we go into conference where the games are local, trips are short, rivalries are intense and the stands are packed. Then we play a 16 team four round playoff where the entries are determined by some arbitrary algorithm that no one is allowed to see, most first round matchups require a ton of travel, the state association takes the entire gate and cranks up the prices so no one shows up to the games. All so one team can say “we won state” at the end.

I have said for years that it would make far more sense in our little corner of the world to just play our conference teams twice, one home and one away. Gates and interest would be up, travel costs down, and it would be a hell of a lot more fun. I would love the challenge of preparing for a team after a close loss the first time, or trying to keep the edge that allowed you to win the first game. Some of the most memorable games in our school’s history have been where we played a conference opponent a 2nd time during the playoffs.

So, this idea of no playoffs and just conference champions could definitely be sold to me.