College Football Hall of Fame coach Barry Switzer gave an exclusive interview to SB Nation's Spencer Hall and discussed among other things, the concept of a four-team playoff scenario between the cream of the crop in the SEC and Big 12.
A conversation between Hall and Switzer just sounds as if its made for transcription, so I'm going to give you a little bit of the interesting points Switzer made right after the jump.
Hall asked Switzer if he'd been following the college football playoff debate, and this is what the former Oklahoma Sooners coach had to say:
The first thing is that the Big 12 and the SEC are kind of the impetus for making this happen, don't you think? They talked about having our champion playing their champion, and therefore those two teams playing might have already have won a national title in some polls. Obviously, they need to have a playoff right away or they lose that. They gotta make a decision to get on board and make this thing happen. The public wants to see it, the fans want to see it, obviously, and I think most coaches want to see it, too.
On conference rematches for national championships and the decision on whether to either avoid or embrace that:
Well, lemme ask you something. You say they want to avoid the LSU-Alabama situation, but I'm gonna tell you: Alabama deserved to be the national champion. When they played again, Alabama proved it. A lot of times, a team with one loss is better than some undefeated teams. I think what Bobby Bowden was talking about is as good as anything, bringing in a group of experts to do it. I think you need people that have coached the game, have spent 30 or 40 years in the game, and know the game to be a part of it.
It's a difficult formula to work out, but we ought to look at every available opportunity to bring about the best format. Obviously, that's a difficult one to figure out right now. You brought something to light I hadn't even thought about: avoiding rematches. I don't even know how you keep from doing that -- because sometimes the best team doesn't always win.