Today, Sports Illustrated college football columnist Stewart Mandel’s name came through the old RSS reader. Hey, Stewart! Let’s just click on through here and see what we’ve got and … oh, no. You’re arguing against a college football playoff? Using the Arizona Cardinals to make your point? Oh no no no no:

Ladies and gentlemen, allow me to present the living embodiment of a devalued regular season: The Arizona Cardinals.

After talking about how the 9-7 Cardinals are proving that the NFL regular season means nothing — as if the Cardinals didn’t have to clinch their division before they made the playoffs — Mandel gets a typically stupid quote from Peter King, chats with Football Outsiders expert Aaron Schatz and eventually segues into the one thing that apparently horrifies college football fans everywhere: the myth of devaluation:

That may be true at first. But as with every other single-elimination sport, sooner or later, the playoffs would become the only thing that matters. As it is today, fans of all but the most woeful teams retain a vested interest until the very end due to the prospect of a bowl berth. With a playoff in place, fans would inevitably lose interest once their teams were eliminated from contention. Even if the bowls stayed in business, they’d become to football what the NIT is to basketball.

Meanwhile, the regular season would become just like the NFL’s and college basketball’s. Instead of revolving around the national-title race, the biggest games at the end of the season would be those involving potential wild-card or at-large teams. In college football, there’s always at least one, if not several, big “national” games each week (like the ones GameDay features). With a playoff, it would be more like basketball, where there are only two truly “big” games unaffiliated fans watch in droves: The two Duke-North Carolina games. Just substitute Ohio State-Michigan and Oklahoma-Texas.

Here, Mandel would be a lot easier to agree if he didn’t overstate the case. Perhaps he’s missed the fact that good college basketball still does high ratings, that the fans of those teams don’t go away just because they know that the game means marginally less than a college football game. Perhaps Mandel just doesn’t watch the NFL. If he did, he’d see that with a playoff system the NFL still does incredible, mind-blowing profits every year; that NFL fans are willing to shell out hundreds of dollars for tickets; that people watch the games incessantly on random Sundays even if their own teams aren’t involved.

To a slight marginal degree, would a playoff de-value certain college football games? Sure. But the majority of the season — the part spent fighting for those playoff spots — would be just as thrilling and big-ticket as anything college football currently has to offer. What’s better, it would drop the gimmicky pretense that “every game matters.” I’m not watching some random Top 25 football team because the “games matter.” I’m watching because I want to watch good football. Same goes for NFL fans. Maybe that’s why the NFL is so much more popular than the college game — the product is better. Maybe losing that gimmick is scary. Having “this game matters!” is a nice thing to fall back on when two teams aren’t particularly fun to watch.

For 100-plus years, it’s been engrained in college football fans that every week matters, and that teams are judged on their season-long performance. The prospect of a 9-7 team (or 9-4 team, as the case may be) playing for the national championship flies in the face of the sport’s entire tradition. The single most common argument college playoff advocates make is that: “Every other sport does it.” What they never bother to consider is that perhaps there’s a reason college football is different than those other sports.

Yes, college football is just special. It’s just different. You guys just don’t understand it, OK? Why would we want to actually settle on a champion when we can have vague arguments about it that serve no one except media outlets? Why would we intelligently settle these arguments on a field of play? Clearly, it’s the rest of the world that needs shaping up; not the BCS. College football has been stupid for 100 years now, and it’ll be gosh durned if it gives up that tradition to a bunch of people who don’t understand it. Like its fans.