My first sport growing up was soccer (lived in the UK for three years).
I recall around 1990 when some folks were getting upset because in the World Cup that year there were a bunch of shootouts; in fact, that World Cup still has the lowest total goals per game (2.21) all these years later. I heard some Alabama fans (I'm not making this up) who didn't know diddly about soccer complaining about how stupid the shoot out was.
My smart aleck response at twenty was, "Yeah, but at least in soccer, the team actually WINS the championship on the field. You can complain about it, but let's solve it like college football does. We'll let the teams play the round robin and if the games end with teams with the same record, we'll let a bunch of sportswriters who don't even play the game vote..I repeat, VOTE!!!! on who the winner is."
Granted - a lot of that went way with the BCS, but look at what happened in 1990 in college ball right after that. Colorado had a loss, a tie, a should have been loss (the Fifth Down to Missouri) and got the Orange Bowl; Ga Tech was the nation's only unbeaten team (ironically - considering this post - they had a tie, ha ha) and they got the Citrus Bowl.
In a rational world, Colorado and GT would have played for the national championship. All these years later and folks on both sides are STILL upset over 'the real champion,' fans of both teams taking the web to argue why THEIR school should be the 'sole' champion. Even if one uses the SoS argument, the fact is that Colorado had TWO imperfections on their record and Tech had one (and it was NOT a loss).
And yet these folks actually thought THAT made more sense than a shootout.
(Btw - how many of you realize that if Notre Dame had not had a PAT blocked in the 1991 Orange Bowl, Colorado ends that game in a 10-10 tie.......and who THEN is the national champion?)
It gets better......Colorado calls different plays inside Notre Dame territory, but in this situation Colorado has EVERYTHING to lose no matter what happens. A tie, they lose. A loss, they lose and for sure lose the title. So they're now in the situation where their play calling (but not the Irish) HAS to be determined by 'we have to score points.' So do they high risk it at the 40? And then.....let's say Notre Dame picks off a pass inside the five.
Do any of you think they're even going to try to drive for a winning field goal with no timeouts and less than a minute left?
One more thing - Colorado's QB went down in the second quarter.
Again - how is THIS more fair than what we have now?