The College Football Playoff logo should just be two guys in suits shaking hands over a boardroom table.
— Paul Myerberg (@PaulMyerberg) April 23, 2013
This isn't that hard, but the NCAA continues to beat its head against the door of common sense, rather than simply reach down and open the damn thing.
It was announced officially that this would be the name, that a group of people had chosen it, and that the NCAA had decreed it all to be so. And the whole thing reeks of one of the problems college football and the NCAA in general grapple with constantly: the whole damn institution is out of touch.
There is absolutely nothing wrong with the college football playoff. It is a wonderful change (15 years too late) that will revitalize the postseason and should help the NCAA finish staking a claim to the new year as its time. This system has the opportunity to so completely blow the old BCS out of the water that we are going to be shocked it took so long. Not to mention the money. Oh god, the piles and piles of money that this is going to bring everyone but the student athletes.
Hell, there isn't even a problem calling it College Football Playoff. That is what it is, and some tacky, forced bit of focus group-tested branding certainly wouldn't improve the thing so much as give us on the internet something else to mock. Besides, sooner or later someone is going to call this thing something clever and it'll stick. An organic nickname. What an idea.
The problem is, it took a bunch of suits in a boardroom time to decide this. And once they decided it, they had to announce that they decided it. It's almost cute how out of touch these guys are. They come to a non-decision and still have a press conference to tell everyone they spent a relaxing weekend at a conference in southern California trying to come up with something, and that something is so chock full of forced authenticity that it reads like the anti-branding branding. The minds behind NCAA football managed to fuck up a name when they didn't even name something.
Now, we wait. Soon the College Football Playoff will be the Fed Ex College Football Playoff presented by Citibank and brought to you in high-definition by Vizio. There won't be a press conference for that. It'll just be plastered all over every media guide and every inch of your television screen.
A rose by any other name... College football continues to amaze me. Who would have thought that the minds that brought you the BCS and 15 years of championship drama could flail around so helplessly at something so simple and still look like fools even when doing it right. Maybe the whole thing stands out so much because we all so completely expected the NCAA to screw this one up. Now that they got one right, even awkwardly and haphazardly so, it stands out against the backdrop of so many poor decisions in the past.
"I'll be happy with whatever," Jim Delany told reporters. "Obviously, I'm not great with names."
When Jim Delany is the most self-aware guy in the room, maybe you need to reevaluate things.