By Neil Schmidt
The Cincinnati Enquirer

The one telling difference between college football and basketball is that after the Final Four, no one will be declaring two teams national champions.

Bowl Championship Series issues aside, there are numerous other disparities between the two biggest collegiate sports. Besides settling its champion on the court, basketball also gains appeal for a format in which it begins March with every team still in contention for the NCAA Tournament.

Football's most thrilling aspect - for contenders, every game is meaningful - also could be called its greatest flaw. One misstep often ends a team's title hopes.

"I think basketball is a good format of not losing all the marbles just because you lost one or two," said Cincinnati athletic director Bob Goin, who previously oversaw contending football teams as Florida State's AD. "In football, I believe the bowl games are great, but there ought to be something else after they're all done to make it set for a national championship."

Goin also prefers basketball's forgiving format, encouraging teams to schedule tough opponents, as opposed to a setup in football in which top teams pad their nonconference slates to avoid potential pitfalls.

It could be inferred that in football, the regular season means everything, and in basketball it means little. Yet C.M. Newton, former chairman of the NCAA men's basketball committee, said that's not necessarily true.

"The seeding that occurs from the (basketball) regular season is very important, so the regular season has some real dynamics in basketball," he said. "It just doesn't have the same importance as football."

High seeds help. Only four times since the NCAA Tournament began seeding teams in 1979 was the winner lower than a No. 3 seed.

Furthering the importance of basketball's regular season is that it has a more exclusive postseason than football. Sixty-five of the 326 basketball teams in Division I, or 20 percent, make the NCAAs. (If you count the National Invitation Tournament, then 95 teams go to the postseason - 29 percent.) Yet 56 of 117 Division I-A football teams, or 48 percent, qualify for bowl games.

The percentages of professional teams that qualify for the postseason are 26.7 percent in Major League Baseball, 37.5 percent in the NFL, 53.3 percent in the NHL and 55 percent in the NBA.

E-mail nschmidt@enquirer.com