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College Football Playoff System 'Bad Idea,' Says Duke Professor

The debate about switching to a playoff system to determine college football's national champion is again in full force.

Last month, President-elect Barack Obama expressed support for such a change, and the recent deadlock among Oklahoma, Texas and Texas Tech atop the Big 12 Conference's South division has further fueled the argument to move away from the current bowl system.

Orin Starn, a Duke University professor who teaches a course on the anthropology of sports, recognizes it "would certainly be fun for college football fans to have a playoff, but it's a very bad idea."

Such a move, he says, would represent "the latest step in the NFL-ization of college football, and the endless stretching of the season and the obligations on the unpaid college students who actually play the games."

A new study shows the average Division I football player already spends 44.8 hours a week on football, which Starn calls "an astonishing amount."

"While most student-athletes are hard-working and do their best in school, this leaves very little time for the ostensible main reason for their being college in the first place, namely learning and enriching educational experience that will prepare them for the rest of their lives."

Starn, a professor of cultural anthropology, thinks the college football season is already too long.

"As college football has become a multibillion-dollar business with millionaire coaches and enormous TV contracts, the season has progressively stretched -- from as few as five back at the dawn of college football in the late 19th century to as many as 14 between league championships and bowl games. A playoff system would likely add yet more games, and that would mean more chunks of time, travel and training for 19- and 20-year-old students who are already way overstretched, and spending far more time on football than their studies and a genuine college experience.

"It will never happen because of the pressures of alumni and the lure of the money, but the college football season should be cut back, not expanded, to get what's supposed to be an amateur sport played by students back into proportion."