NASCAR fans can only laugh as NCAA football fans unleash complaints

A 12-team playoff for NCAA football was going to solve everything that was wrong with past postseason formats.

It was going to guarantee every game was going to be a 38-35 thriller, that absolutely nobody would feel shortchanged when the final rankings were revealed, that the best eight teams would be in the quarterfinals, that the best four teams would be in the semifinals, that the best two teams would be in the championship, and that the best team would be champion.

Everything was going to be just great. There would be no more complaining, no more biases, no more lopsided games, and no more poor decisions by the committee.

That is, until the new format was actually implemented.

Two teams ranked outside of the top eight received byes to the quarterfinals. Two of the top 12 teams weren't in the 12-team bracket. None of the four teams with byes were favored in the quarterfinals. None of the four teams with byes advanced to the semifinals. And just one of the first eight games wasn't a double-digit blowout effectively decided by halftime.

For NASCAR fans, does any of this sound familiar? Better question: does any of it not sound familiar?

The biggest rewards thus far have gone not to the highly seeded conference champions but to two teams that lost their conference championship games, a team that couldn't handle losing a rivalry game (as a 24-point favorite) that eliminated them from conference championship eligibility, and a team not even in a conference. Only one of those four teams did not enter the playoffs coming off of a loss.

Nobody should be surprised. But with the 12-team format supposedly here to save the world from a four-team format that, in 10 tries, never produced three competitive games in the same season, many fans are upset with the format and feel that it should be changed (already).

They feel that the regular season doesn't really matter, and they're not totally wrong.

But all NASCAR fans can do is sit back and laugh, having been complaining about their own playoff format for the past two decades (specifically, the past 11 years).

Last year, it was the driver who finished in 15th place in the regular season standings who was crowned champion, and he was crowned champion after competing for absolutely nothing in four of the nine playoff races leading up to the championship decider in Phoenix Raceway.

It would be almost like giving Boise State a bye straight to the championship game (or giving Penn State a double bye for losing their conference championship game – wait a minute...).

Team Penske's Joey Logano won a regular season race, a five-overtime race, to clinch his playoff spot. He might as well have finished 34th (last) in regular season points. After all, that's what Wood Brothers Racing's Harrison Burton did, and his win still got him into the 16-driver postseason too.

Logano then did what he needed to do to advance through the playoffs, winning the opening races of the round of 16 and round of 8 so that he was effectively competing for nothing in the other two races of both rounds. He then won the winner-take-all season finale, and even with all of that late-season success, he still failed to finish the season top 10 in total points scored.

Does the new NCAA format really need to be adjusted because your team showed up and got run out of the stadium by superior competition when it mattered most – first round or not?

Did you really think every game would be a double-overtime thriller just because the College Football Playoff expanded?

Was a bracket that featured eight more teams – and basically amounted to random seeding – really the solution?

The fact is there are nowhere near 12 "great" teams in college football, and the regular season doesn't ultimately matter when it comes to crowning a champion. NASCAR fans have been on about this for years in their sport.

Should the playoff field really consist of roughly half of the full-time driver pool, with a single win in 26 regular season races automatically locking a driver into the postseason?

On a totally unrelated note, can you imagine if NASCAR's playoff challengers were determined by a committee?

No one is disputing the fact that both formats can be improved. But on one hand, it is kind of amusing to hear these similar arguments turn up in another sport – a "ball" sport, no less, in which playoffs are, at least according to NASCAR fans, supposedly acceptable.

The NASCAR anti-playoffs argument is always that the regular season isn't supposed to be the be-all and end-all in these other "stick and ball" sports, right? Just in NASCAR. But apparently not all NCAA football fans agree; it should matter a lot more there too.