FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- Bill Hancock was confidently but nervously anticipating the first four-team playoff in big-time college football last year at this time.
Hancock, the executive director of the College Football Playoff, needn't have worried. The games -- featuring Alabama and Ohio State, Florida State and Oregon -- were an attendance and ratings hit.
As he anticipates the second year of playoffs, which begin today with semifinal games in Miami Gardens, Fla., and in Arlington, Texas, Hancock is equally confident but not nearly as nervous.
"Last year, we thought it was going to work, but we didn't know for sure," he said Tuesday. "This time, we know for sure."
Indeed, college football, with its loyal followers who had long pined for a championship playoff, is gobbling it up.
Yet for a number of reasons, there is a different feel to this year's final four. Last year's inaugural tournament seemed sexier. There was the head-to-head matchup between the Heisman Trophy winner, Oregon quarterback Marcus Mariota, and the previous winner, Florida State's Jameis Winston. There was the compelling story of Cardale Jones, a third-string quarterback who came off the bench to lead Ohio State to a Big Ten title, a stunning semifinal victory over Alabama and a victory over Oregon in the title game.
Beyond that, last year's playoffs also marked the most significant refinement in the process of determining a national champion.
"It was the birth of a new baby last year -- it was the firstborn," Hancock said. "There was a palatable excitement last year over that aspect of a new event."
I have never been a fan of the universe of irrelevant bowl games in college football (I was 0-3 in bowl games as a player; maybe that's why). The advent of the playoff series makes the smattering of bowl games more irrelevant than they were when we used to argue about mythical championships. The only games that matter now are the two semifinals and the national championship game.
While the scheduling of the playoff around the antiquated existing bowl system was an early hurdle for its organizers, one of the most frequently mentioned criticisms of the playoff system is that it adds more commercialism to intercollegiate athletics. That's true, but that horse was reported missing decades ago.
I have no problem with the so-called commercialization of college sports. The players and coaches who participate in nonrevenue sports aren't conflicted either; they know they are kept afloat because of money generated by football and men's basketball.
The reality is that every industry, including journalism, is trying with varying degrees of success to figure out ways to sustain itself without compromising values. In some instances, we have had to reconfigure our definition of values.
The challenge for administrators like Hancock is to preserve the collegiate atmosphere even as the event grows. I enjoy the NFL playoffs, but there is a difference that should be preserved between top-tier college football and the NFL.
For a traditionalist like Hancock, this means using marching bands at halftime rather than headliner acts. It means making sure that the colleges, not corporate sponsors, receive the majority of the tickets, ensuring that the majority of the fans in the seats actually -- passionately -- care about who wins the game.
That was why last January's Ohio State-Oregon title game in Arlington, Texas, even though it sold out, felt like an enormous college football game, not a Super Bowl.
"That was the highest praise that I heard last year," Hancock said.
Given the money involved, there is clamoring for more teams to be added to the tournament when the current contract expires in 2025. I'd like to see as many as eight teams. Hancock wants to keep it at four.
"It's important to those of us who are stewards of the game to resist the outside pressures to make it something other than college sports," Hancock said. "We do not want this to become a Super Bowl or even talk about it as a Super Bowl. We want to create a collegiate feel about the game so that when people leave the event, they knew that they were attending a college football game."
That's a tough task, but an achievable one, if university presidents can wrestle college football away from the conference commissioners and business interests that have controlled it for decades.
Basketball's Final Four has grown in popularity and prosperity without sacrificing the collegiate feel. College football can do the same, even if it will be a wilder beast to tame.
"In 25 years, people will look back and say, 'Wow, look how this thing has changed,' " Hancock said. "I hope they'll be able to say, 'Look, we still have a college sports event.' "
I'm eager, as well, to see what sort of enormously successful event this tournament can become.
Sports on 12/31/2015