“Amid all the fun, we have people yelling that the sport has to change. It needs a playoff system. Why? So the casual fans who are confused by the BCS and the angry columnists who write about college football three times a year can get finality.

“Great idea. Let’s make college football more like the NFL, which would rival rodeo in popularity if it weren’t for gambling and fantasy football.

“Or better yet, let’s have a 16-team playoff as is done in the NBA, where the regular season is so boring arenas pipe in music during games and fans pay full attention only to the ‘entertainment’ during timeouts – i.e., whether that freaky guy will be able to fold his legs and arms into a translucent box.

“No wait, let’s make college football more like baseball, which just produced a postseason that will be best remembered for those incessant ‘Frank TV’ ads.

“We all love the NCAA basketball tournament. But you can’t do it in football. A team can’t play six games in 18 days. And let’s face it, non-conference basketball games are glorified exhibitions. College football plays meaningful games every Saturday. Even some Thursdays.”

– Teddy Greenstein, columnist. [Chicago Tribune]

“We’re just asking people to be inclusive and take a process that provides for an opportunity. (First-year Pittsburgh Steelers coach) Mike Tomlin would never have been hired if he had not had an interview, because he certainly wasn’t a leading candidate for the Steelers when that job came about. But he got the job because of the interview.

“Everybody may have somebody in mind, but it may go through a process in order to arrive at that.”

– Floyd Keith, executive director of Black Coaches and Administrators, reacting to searches for head football coaches at the end of the 2007 season in which only one candidate was interviewed. [Houston Chronicle]

“You end up in a situation where you have Pat Boone talking to Snoop Dogg and Ludacris, Lawrence Welk talking to 50 Cent about what it is we ought to be doing. These kids are sitting there looking at him saying, ‘Man, wow, I have no idea what he’s talking about, and in any event I’m not going to go there if for no other reason than it’s not cool.’ ”

– Harry Edwards, professor emeritus of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley, on a future for athletics programs that fail to hire minority coaches. [South Florida Sun-Sentinel]