Sunday, January 11, 2009

The BCS is BS

How would you like it if you were a gourmand, seated at a five-star restaurant...you just had a marvelous appetizer, and were ready to order your entrée, when the waiter told you they just closed the kitchen for the night? You would probably not be very happy, and you would certainly be unfulfilled.

This is how all Division I college football fans feel (unless you are a Florida Gators fan). The BCS (Bowl Championship Sh*t) games over the last week were generally interesting -- sometimes very exciting -- contests, but they don’t mean a thing. However, if they were the quarter-finals of the National Championship Tournament, they would have great meaning.

After the BCS games we now have four teams that could argue they are the National Champs: Florida (13-1), Southern California (12-1), Texas (13-1), and undefeated Utah (13-0). All four are arguably great teams, but which one is the best? We will never know. That’s because the Einsteins who govern the NCAA decided that every sport, in every division, can have a playoff to determine its champion, except the most important -- Division I. In Division I, they let some computers, some voodoo doctors, and someone to be named later, decide which teams play for the mythical National Championship. And to hell with the other six legitimate teams.

It doesn’t make any sense to any real football fan. It doesn’t make any sense to anybody with an IQ over 80. It just plain doesn’t make any sense at all. But the NCAA, and the college presidents (who presumably are intelligent people), steadfastly refuse to have a playoff.

It would not be hard to do, and it would not affect the Bowl system as we know it:
  1. Reduce the number of regular season games by one
  2. Have all conferences decide their champion with a Championship game
  3. Play all the minor Bowl games between December 1-14
  4. Have the top eight teams playoff in a seeded format during the next three weeks, using all the major Bowls. Simply rotate which Bowl games will host the semi-finals, and the final, games each year.
I know that I would love to see if Utah could knock off Southern Cal and Florida, the way they did Alabama (who was No. 1 practically all year). It is a shame that we will never know which of these deserving teams is truly No.1.
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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I would agree only if the players got payed amajority of the massive profits derived from having these games.
SJM