“And the #1 Reason I keep hearing for not having a true playoff for the national championship is that it would make the season last too long.”
It appears they’ll always find “reasons” for no playoffs. I’m pretty confident that the real reason, though, is that the weaker teams know they’d never make the finals; so they fight going to playoffs every year.
And, BTW, I also think the real reason that Georgia isn’t in the Rose Bowl is because they can’t upstage the championship game. The “tradition” reason is baloney.
There is one and only one reason for not having a playoff. That reason is the NCAA would control the playoff which would be a disaster.
The major football powers fought to long and too hard to wrest control of the TV schedule (and money) from the NCAA to give that up now.
Only about 20 years ago, the NCAA controlled, in the interest of balance and fairness, what teams played on TV. The NCAA decreed that no team could appear on TV more than twice a season. This allowed more teams to be on TV and resulted in very poor TV schedules. We had a lot of really bad teams playing really bad teams in really bad games that no one cared about. The NCAA also took half the TV revenues for itself and redistribution to teams that didn’t get to play on TV. The smaller schools loved this systems since it gave them a cut of the TV money.
OU sued the NCAA on the basis that it’s TV rights were it’s rights and not the NCAA’s. The USSC upheld OU. This had three effects. One, this meant that the networks could schedule any team any time they wanted. Two, a lot more money for the big schools. Three, the NCAA manufactured a recruiting scandal and slapped OU on probation for two years.
The current BCS is managed outside the NCAA. Until you can figure out a way to keep the NCAA out of the playoffs, the playoffs will not happen. You must also figure out how to keep all the smaller schools from voting on the playoff and revenue. Otherwise, like good socialists, they will vote themselves a slice.
Quite frankly, everyone who spends time manufacturing various playoff brackets showing how easy it is are wasting their time. Everyone who spends time showing how to schedule the playoffs is wasting their time. Everyone who spends time ‘integrating’ their playoff with the bowl system is wasting their time. Those aren’t the issues.
The issue is that a NCAA playoff would be controlled by the NCAA and the major football powers will not let that happen since they know how the NCAA will screw them over.