Penn State President Graham Spanier said yesterday that he is partially supportive of a college football playoff system, but the underlying message to proponents of the idea was the same.

Don't hold your breath.

Speaking to a sports journalism class yesterday, Spanier -- the Big Ten's Bowl Championship Series representative -- said he sees merits in a four-team playoff system, but said there is little support across the board from Div. I college presidents in favor of any such system.

"Of all of the presidents of major universities, I am probably the most supportive of a playoff," Spanier said. "But I am about 50-50 on it -- and I'm the most supportive. It goes downhill from there. So I have doubts about it. I could see some scenarios under which you have as many as four teams after the bowls."

Spanier made the distinction that he was not at all interested in creating an NFL-style playoff system, but would prefer to base something off of the existing bowl structure. But even with the four-team post-bowl system that he mentioned, he doesn't have much optimism.

"That's just kind of wild thinking because it's not going to happen," Spanier said.

Though he specifically mentioned presidents from major universities, Spanier later clarified to say he was referring to all of the Div. I presidents.

"If you really took a secret ballot of all 117 Div. I schools, you'd have a majority of the presidents saying no," he said.

The controversy over a college football postseason has existed for years, and despite the institution of the BCS, it has only seemed to serve as a catalyst for more debate. While many fans and writers have been clamoring for some semblance of a playoff, as Spanier said, the majority of university presidents are against the idea.

According to Spanier, some of the main issues that the presidents have with a playoff system include a fear of "overcommercialization" of the sport, the fact that they like the existing system, and that a playoff may cause the season to spill over into schools' spring semesters.

Pundits of a playoff system point to the hypothetical windfall in revenue that universities would receive from such a structure, but Spanier dispelled that as a widely-held belief among the presidents.

"It's not perfectly clear to everybody that there is more money on the table that way," Spanier said. "If you start putting too much emphasis on the postseason games, you diminish the value of the games during the season. Reporters go out and say, 'There's $100 million in an NFL style playoff at the end of the season.' They haven't looked at the whole variables about what just happened the past three or four months and the value of those games."

Spanier used as an example the difference in interest between college basketball regular season games and tournament games, saying that presidents don't want such a discrepancy in college football.

"What are the fans really interested in?" Spanier said. "How many fans are racing to their TV sets on a Saturday afternoon to see a collegiate basketball game compared to the massive viewership that's occurring during the March Madness. That's different in football. In football, you have people at their TV sets every Saturday afternoon watching. Are you still going to have that if they're all waiting for the big postseason?"

Given the general lack of support for a playoff, Spanier said that he would also be in favor of adjusting the current system, as has been done for the past few years. And while sportswriters have been some of the most vocal in completely dissolving the BCS to create a playoff, Spanier said that support won't matter in the long run.

"Reporters, you can write about it all you want. You're wasting your ink," he said. "It is amazing to me how many columnists every year are still haranguing about this as if maybe if they write about it enough, someone will believe it and it will happen. It's not going to happen."