2020 Macadoodle's Mailbag: 7th Edition

GET THE INSIDE SCOOP EVERY DAY WITH YOUR PREMIUM SUBSCRIPTION!

GD: Yes. But I feel like I might lose fewer golf balls at Augusta.

GD: I'm going to say right off the top that I won't put Patrick Mahomes in the top five...yet. In a year, that might change. In three years, if he stays healthy, I think it probably will. But I'm going to wait just a minute before I do that. With that said, the top five of my lifetime would probably be (in no particular order): Tom Brady, Drew Brees, John Elway, Joe Montana and Peyton Manning. I know that leaves off Aaron Rodgers and that's probably wrong, but I don't know who I take off my list. The answer of most people would be Elway. Perhaps I'm scarred by watching him crush my soul so many times, but I have him on any "best quarterbacks" list and I always will. The only other one you can argue Rodgers should replace is probably Brees, but Brees owns pretty much every passing record and he's got the same number of titles Rodgers has. Brady, Montana and Manning are making pretty much everyone's list of the top five of the last 40 years and maybe the top five ever. Some really good ones but not quite on this list would be Warren Moon, Steve Young, Kurt Warner, Brett Favre, Dan Marino and Jim Kelly. I didn't realize how tough that list was going to be until I started looking at some of the guys I left off.

GD: I have two different answers here. First, we'll just talk about fixes to the actual game. In basketball, I give players six fouls and find some way to make sure we aren't getting 50 fouls called in a game. It makes it completely and totally unwatchable. I also want the one and done gone, but that's an NBA thing, not an NCAA thing. In football, quit stopping the clock after first downs and go to the NFL clock rules. Also make halftime shorter (sorry to offend the people that think the band and such are an important thing at college football games, which it is not). You can shave 20 minutes a game right there.

The bigger question to me is how you fix the sport as a whole because honestly, I think college sports are getting less and less worthwhile for most people. I think college sports fans, if you could do a demographic study, are probably largely people over 35 or 40 years old. The younger people are watching the NFL and the NBA and don't care nearly as much about college sports. Student attendance would support this theory.

The two sports have opposite problems. College football has a postseason that applies only to the elite and thus renders 95% of the country mostly playing for pride and show. College basketball has a postseason that renders the entire regular season mostly meaningless and means that 95% of the fans don't start watching until March. So how do we fix that?

In football, you're never going to get away with scholarship reductions, which is really the only way to increase parity. You can't tell a kid where he can or can't go to school. You can't put in a "salary cap" situation where you say, no team can sign more than two five-stars in any given year. The only way is to increase the size of the playoff. I'm not sure eight teams really does a lot to make it better because you're still talking about five conference champs, a group of five team and two at-larges. So you're not getting a whole bunch of new blood into the playoff. If you really want to make the whole thing worthwhile, you go to a 16-team playoff and reduce the number of regular season games (I'd say you also cut out conference championship games, but due to TV rights and the money associated with them, I just don't see a way that happens). So let's go to a 10 game regular season. Every league plays the same number of conference games (I don't care if it's eight or nine, just settle on a number). Every league has a conference title game. You're at 11 games now. Then you take the top 16 teams and play eight first round games on campus the week before Christmas. Play the quarterfinals on New Year's Day. Semifinals the next week, national championship the week after that. That means you have two teams that play 15 games and the season is over around January 15th. This year, you had two teams that played 15 games and the season was over on January 13th. We've changed nothing.

The College Football Playoff has been in existence for six years. That's a total of 24 playoff spots. Those 24 have been claimed by a total of ten teams: Alabama (5), Clemson (5), Oklahoma (4), Ohio State (3), Georgia (1), Notre Dame (1), Florida State (1), Michigan State (1), Oregon (1), Washington (1), LSU (1). Under my plan, in the last six years, 44 teams would have made a 16-team playoff. That means more than one-third of the Division One teams would have legitimately been in a position to win a national title by winning four games. Here is how it would breakdown by teams over that time: Ohio State (6), Alabama (6), Clemson (5), Oklahoma (5), Penn State (4). Georgia (4), Michigan (4), Notre Dame (4), Oregon (3), Auburn (3), Wisconsin (3), Washington (3), Michigan State (3), Florida State (3), TCU (3), Baylor (2)., West Virginia (2), USC (2), Stanford (2), Florida (2), UCF (2), LSU (2), Ole Miss (2), Utah (1), Memphis (1)., Washington State (1), Kentucky (1), Texas (1), Miami (1), Colorado (1), Oklahoma State (1), Louisville (1), Western Michigan (1), Iowa (1), North Carolina (1), Northwestern (1), Houston (1), Mississippi State (1), Arizona (1), Kansas State (1), Georgia Tech (1), UCLA (1), Arizona State (1), Boise State (1). You're basically increasing the number of teams that would have had a chance to win a national title by about 450%. Why is that bad? (A side note here, I used the final regular season CFP rankings from each year to compile this list. In four of the six years, there was a Group of Five team in the top 16. The two that didn't feature one pushed 2019 Iowa and 2014 Missouri out of the 16-team playoff in those years. Those teams were ranked 16th, but in having to have a Group of Five team they were left out. If you don't have that rule, Boise and Memphis are off the list and Iowa and Mizzou are on it).

I'm sure there would be some arguments against it. Let's address them:

*The schedule and adding games. The season doesn't get over any later. Every team on this list already played 13 or 14 games anyway. By eliminating a couple of regular season games, you solve this problem.

*But what about the bowl games? Play them. Teams that are outside the top 16 get to go to the same worthless bowl games they've always gone to. The quarterfinals, semifinals and national title game can be rotated among the current New Year's Six games. There are actually seven games here, so you can either add one bowl to this rotation or you can take a game that gets a quarterfinal and have it host the title game once every six years. Problem solved.

*The regular season won't mean as much. Sure it will. It will just mean that teams can afford a couple losses and not have the season be over. But there's still going to be plenty of competition to get in. Finishing 16th still means you're among the top 1/8th of teams in the country. It would still be the most difficult playoff to qualify for in all of sports.

*You're adding a bunch of teams that can't win a national title. First off, says who? What if the 13 seed has a good day on the right day and beats the 4? And then it gets to play a 12 that has beaten a 5? And then it has another good day and beats the 1? It's not impossible. Upsets happen all the time. Second, who really cares? Most of the national titles in college basketball go to the elite teams, but nobody cares. The common saying is that the first two rounds are for the little guys and the next two weeks are for the big boys. Cool. Give me a first week or two where I get to see teams like Minnesota, Houston, Boise, and Washington State with a shot at a title. And if it still ends up with Clemson/Bama XIV in the title game, so be it.

In basketball, I say you put the regular season conference champion automatically in the NCAA Tournament. Then you also put the conference tournament champion in. What that's going to mean is that the number of at large spots changes each year. There are currently 68 spots in the tournament (I'd go back to 64, but whatever) and 32 conferences. That means if every conference has the same tournament and regular season champion, there are 36 at large spots (the same number as there are now). It means if every conference has a different regular season and tournament champ, there will still be four at-large spots for the next four teams. You want to make every game matter, including conference tournament games? Do this. Because you're not going to know until Selection Sunday how many spots are available. It would be amazing. Ratings would go through the roof. They'd print money for these conference tournaments that a lot of people ignore. And every single team in the country would have two chances to earn their way in. For what it's worth, I'd also start the season on December 15th instead of early November and I'd also eliminate some non-conference games, but that's just me.

Macadoodle's provides fine wine, beer and spirits in Pineville, Branson, Joplin, Springfield, North Springfield, Columbia and Republic, Missouri plus Springdale, Arkansas. Click the logo above to find the location closest to you today.