According to a poll released this week, a majority of college football fans want to scrap the Bowl Championship Series and replace it with a playoff system.
Those people are half right. The BCS should disappear. But create a playoff system? Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
“College football fans are not in love with the current system in which two teams that play for the national championship are picked by computers, sportswriters and coaches,” Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, told The Associated Press. “Settle the question on the field, voters say more than two-to-one.”
Brown needs to get one fact straight. Sportswriters don’t decide who’s in the BCS. The AP told the BCS to quit using its poll to select teams a few years back. A lot of media people didn’t feel right about determining which colleges were going to hit the jackpot by playing in a BCS bowl. That was the right move.
Some members of Congress want a college football championship, too. It’s comforting to know that Congress doesn’t have any pressing business and can spend time trying to fix college football. After all, they have done such a splendid job fixing the economy and winning the war on terror.
A House subcommittee has approved legislation that would force big-time college football to use a playoff system to determine a national champion. The AP reports that the bill would make it illegal to promote a national championship game “or make a similar representation,” unless it results from a playoff.
Thankfully, there is no Senate version of this bill. But shortly after being elected in 2008, President Barack Obama said there should be a playoff.
The poll shows 48 percent oppose having Congress force college football to begin a playoff. Surprisingly, 45 percent like the idea. These folks probably support the metric system, too.
This constant cry for a playoff is a symptom of what some have called the ESPN-ization of American sports. Everything now has to be about a national title. Why? College football might be the last college or pro sport where the regular season is more important than the postseason. Let’s keep it that way.
A playoff isn’t practical. This isn’t the NFL, where relatively few fans travel to away games. Do you think after a 12-game regular season, fans will attend up to three postseason games? I don’t. So you’re going to get early round games played in front of empty seats. Don’t we see enough of that in our present bowl system?
At this point, some will say, “How are these players supposed to go to class and take exams if they’re playing all these extra games?” I don’t even pretend that most college athletes, especially those playing for the biggest schools, are “amateur” athletes. The NCAA isn’t about amateurism, it’s shamateurism. The NCAA certainly doesn’t worry about who’s going to class during the Division I college basketball tournament. March Madness makes millions for the NCAA, you see.
Do you remember when Jan. 1 was a second Christmas Day for college football fans? There were relatively few bowl games in those days and only four were played on New Year’s Day. First came the Cotton Bowl, which matched the champion of the old Southwest Conference against a Southeastern Conference team or maybe Notre Dame. The Rose Bowl followed, in which a Pac-10 team would humiliate a Big Ten team. (That’s still going on.) Then the Sugar Bowl, which featured the SEC champion, would go head-to-head with the Orange Bowl, which featured the Big Eight champion.
At the end of the day, there would be two or three teams proclaiming that they were No. 1. No matter what the AP voters decided, fans would argue about the outcome for the rest of the year. I enjoyed that.
The BCS and the proliferation of bowls have sucked the excitement out of bowl season. Going to a bowl once meant something. Even as recently as 1997, Mississippi State finished 7-4 and wasn’t invited to a bowl. Now there are 6-6 teams in bowl games. If you’re no better than .500, do you deserve to play in a postseason game?
Now we have a lot of “who cares” bowls (unless your favorite team is in one) and four BCS games that are essentially placeholders until the BCS Championship. Sure there are some good matchups, but it’s all meaningless this year except for the Alabama-Texas game on Jan. 7.
Bill Hancock, executive director of the Bowl Championship Series, told the AP that a playoff system is easier said than done.
“It’s easy to support a hypothetical playoff on paper, but no one has come up with a viable way to actually create one without diminishing the value of the regular season and ending the bowl games as we know them,” he said. “Yes, a playoff could be created, but at a tremendous loss to the unique game that we love.”
For once, I agree with a BCS official.
