It’s official. After this season, anyone who thinks that the BCS (or any other “bowl” system) is a good way to pick a national championship is a damn fool. A few years ago, you were just a guy with a different opinion… a traditionalist. After the last two years, you were… a little dense. After all, it could’ve just been some odd fluke. After this year? Moron. The BCS sucks. Even Adult Swim thinks so:
The real problem is old fogies who remember how great the Rose Bowl used to be. Here’s a deal: we’ll stay off your lawn if you stay out of our college football. Deal?
Update: I saw this over at Run Up The Score (a Penn State Blog), and thought it was probably the most awesome thing I’ve read since I turned in my Tax exam three hours ago:
Of course it’s a farce — how else could a sport in which absolutely no artistic component is necessary to prevail allow a champion to be determined by balloting? For God’s sake, even if you’re bumper bowling, the winner is determined by actual head to head competition. The douchebags at the snack bar don’t get to vote on it.
December 2nd, 2007 at 9:51 pm
Count me in the “damn fool” camp. I could tolerate a plus-one format, but full scale playoffs have no place in college football.
December 2nd, 2007 at 9:54 pm
Tell that to Divisions I-AA, II, and III, for whom playoffs have been working splendidly for decades… a stark contrast to the constant idiocy the bowls provide us.
December 2nd, 2007 at 10:12 pm
Are you ready to end the regular season before Thanksgiving, so we can get in enough rounds for a full-scale playoff? Because that’s what I-AA and lower do. My sister’s a James Madison alumna (I-AA national champs 2004), and the Richmond-headquartered CAA is the best conference in I-AA, so I pay a decent amount of attention to their system.
This year in I-A is a trainwreck to be sure, but playoffs are completely unworkable from a fan travel perspective, and they’d kill off every uninvolved bowl. That’s a lot of tradition, and more to the point, a lot of money, down the drain.
December 2nd, 2007 at 10:27 pm
Oh, right. Because that’s what college football should be about: Money.
Also: I’m not sure what sort of “full scale” playoff you’re talking about, but even a sixteen team playoff would only take four weeks… and there are five more weekends starting with this coming weekend and ending the same weekend as the BCS Championship game. So unless you want a playoff that includes more than half of the teams in D-IA, there’s already enough time, and that’s before you consider the possibility of taking the game back out of the regular season that was added a few years back.
What I love is listening to all of the bowl-fans come up with nonsense excuses when the real reason they like the bowls is “just because”.
You’re right about one thing, though… the only reason we don’t have a playoff already is money. Nobody really cares about crowning a champion, least of all the NCAA, as long as they get paid.
December 2nd, 2007 at 10:28 pm
Also: the regular season already ends before, or shortly after, thanksgiving.
December 3rd, 2007 at 1:46 am
I am in complete agreement with you, Pete. The BCS and bowl games are all about money. Quite sad.
December 3rd, 2007 at 2:16 am
Oh, oh, oh… pete call on me. I got a good one. If there was just playoffs for D-1 college football we wouldn’t get the pleasure of watching hilarious aqua teen hunger force videos bashing the BCS. I’m sold aqua teen hunger force should replace all college football commentators. I’d much rather hear who meatwad thinks is going to win then Lee Corso.
December 3rd, 2007 at 12:18 pm
Here is one stumbling block that no one ever mentions. There is no playoff, in any sport, at any level, where the NCAA does not require all of the conferences to get an automatic bid. If you support a playoff, you have to support a playoff system that includes the champions of the Sun Belt, the MAC, etc. The system would have to include Central Michigan and Troy at the expense of say, Illinois and Tennessee. The NCAA is not about to make an exemption for Division I football. I’m not that eager to see a Central Michigan-Ohio State showdown.
The only year that I would have whole-heartedly endorsed a playoff system was in 2003, when USC, Oklahoma and Auburn all had legitimate claims to play for the national title. But this year? Ohio State is really the only team that comes close to deserving to play for the national title and their claim isn’t that strong (the best teams they beat were underachieving Michigan and Wisconsin squads) and is really based on the fact that their only loss came to a fellow BCS bowl team (Illinois). LSU got in on the basis of winning the SEC and having two triple OT losses to good teams (Ark. and Kentucky). Every other team played their way out of the title game. Kansas lost to the only good team it played. Mizzou couldn’t win their conference. UGA couldn’t win its division. Oklahoma lost to a 6-6 Colorado team. USC was beaten by Stanford. Oregon was awful after Dixon went down. BC got hammered by VTech, who was annihilated by LSU early in the season. I like the fact that teams have to earn a chance to play for the BCS title. I’m with Kevin — I could handle a Plus One. But a full scale playoff would ruin the high-wire act that teams are forced to complete in the regular season.
December 3rd, 2007 at 6:05 pm
The reason nobody mentions it, I think, is because it’s silly. For one thing, the NCAA doesn’t ‘require’ anything, they’re the ones who get to decide. To say nothing of the irony of arguing that the NCAA would never allow D-IA college football to be different from any other sport or division… I mean… how many other sports use a “bowl” system to select their champions?
…to say nothing of the fact that they don’t currently require all conference champions to get a BCS bowl game, meaning that an undefeated conference champion which doesn’t finish well in the BCS can’t even make it to a BCS game, let alone the championship.
The argument also is neither here nor there. If we’re talking about what SHOULD happen, what the NCAA might be willing to do is irrelevant… if we’re talking about what CAN happen, it seems pretty clear that a playoff is out of the question anyway.
PS: I can’t find anything that requires conference champions in Women’s Gymnastics be selected for the regionals, and there’s certainly no rule requiring it for the Super Six… and I imagine there are plenty of other sports divided into “regions” for whom conferences are fairly irrelevant.
December 3rd, 2007 at 8:50 pm
First off, I’ll amend my statement to this: there is no NCAA sport that does not use a regional qualifying system or mandate that every conference get an automatic qualifying bid.
The gulf between what SHOULD happen in this world and what CAN happen in this world is wider than my ass. And that’s saying something.
In terms of voting on changes, Troy and Middle Tennessee State have just as many votes as Alabama and Ohio State. So why are the Sun Belt, CUSA and MAC teams going to support a change where there is no chance in hell that they will ever play in it and lose their source of exposure, namely the piddly ass bowls they play in? You are asking them to give up their one chit in exchange for the greater good. As socialism has proved, that doesn’t work especially well.
Saying that the preservation of the bowl system is entirely about money is inaccurate. If the NCAA went to a 16-team playoff, the TV contract would dwarf the 6 billion they get from CBS for March Madness. There is something other than money at play here.
December 3rd, 2007 at 9:25 pm
“there is no NCAA sport that does not use a regional qualifying system or mandate that every conference get an automatic qualifying bid.”
…except for D-IA football, so there’d really be no reason that that would have to change.
Those conferences already have no chance of ever playing for a BCS Title (See, e.g., Hawaii) but the ones who are against it aren’t the little schools, generally they’d love a playoff. They believe they could win in that system.
The ones who always deride the playoff format (besides the media, of course) is the BCS conferences. Ask yourself why that is.
…it’s money.
It’s not about the money the NCAA gets… it’s about the money the schools and conferences get. They’re getting fat on bowl games, especially crappy teams in major conferences… never go to a bowl, get some money anyway. If you move to a playoff system, quite a few of the 32 bowl games would disappear.
But the key factor would be that the national championship would be won on the field and not in the newspapers like it is now.
December 3rd, 2007 at 10:58 pm
Why would the small conferences like a playoff? Under a 16-team playoff predicated on selecting the top 16 teams, Hitler would be having snowball fights in Hades before a Sun Belt team made it in. And their bowl would disappear, depriving them of their chance at minor limelight. People barely care about it now when it is televised on ESPN8 (The Ocho). I think every bowl would disappear because no one is going to tune into a Penn State-Oregon Rose Bowl in the midst of the playoffs.
Myles Brand does not have an “NCAA basketball tournament” vault where he bathes in money like Scrooge McDuck. That money is distributed to the conferences, based in part on how the member schools perform in the tournament. The money problem can be easily addressed by the conferences if they wanted to solve it. You can still have the money go to the conferences, to be distributed to the member schools, based on post-season performance and the pot would even be bigger than it is now and the payout to each school would be even bigger.
The championship is won on the field. The winner of the Ohio State-LSU game will be declared the national champion. The teams are picked based on the selections of computers, coaches and an assortment of people drawn at random from a phone book, also known as the Harris poll. The newspapers have not been involved in the selection ever since the AP removed itself from the BCS.
December 3rd, 2007 at 11:17 pm
Well now who said anything about a 16 team system predicated on anything? It could easily be a 12 team playoff with automatic bids going to the champs of the current BCS Conference (ACC, Big12, Big East, Big Ten, Pac-10, and SEC) two bids reserved for teams from the remaining conferences and four at large spots… chosen by poll, selection committee, or whatever.
Having a playoff doesn’t require any of the problems you’ve added to it.
Further, there is no “national champion”. You have a “BCS Champion” and an “AP Champion”… hence why USC thinks they have a three-peat and a dynasty when they’ve only won one crystal football.
Further, the conferences obviously think they can make more money in the bowl system. In reality, they’re probably right. It’s easy to just assume that a football playoff would generate more revenue than 32 bowl games, but it’s not necessarily the case. You’d have less than half of the games (unless you went to something more than a 16 team playoff, which would really be difficult to organize) so they would, on average, have to make twice as much.
I think it’s unlikely that the playoff championship would have significantly higher revenue than the BCS championship, although the disparity would grow as you go down the playoff and bowl rankings, with the first round of the playoffs likely making significantly more than a 3rd tier bowl game…. but you still have the problem of having 12 rather than 64 teams involved…
Also, to say that nobody would watch the second-rate teams playing in bowl games ignores the reality that they already watch those games… if they competed directly with the playoffs, sure they’d take a hit, but people watch the NIT, so it’s not like there’s no market for it at all.
December 3rd, 2007 at 11:34 pm
In a world where we could create a playoff system from scratch without any other considerations, yes, there are no problems. But if you want to create a playoff in the world as it actually exists, you have to get the votes of the small conferences. And that poses problems.
Yes, there are no guarantees for how much money would be generated by the playoff system vs. the current bowl system. But Fox paid 80 million for 4 BCS games where only one of them actually determines a national title. The amount that would be paid for 15 games where every game means something would be astronomical. As the tournament gained in popularity, 500 million per year would not be wholly unreasonable. How does the Rose Bowl make so much money? Its TV deal. That, combined with sponsorships, is how bowls make money that they use to pay teams/conferences. And that pie would explode.
Would people watch the bowls? Sure. Put football on television and SOMEONE will watch it. You can always get a few degenerate gamblers to watch a game. But right now, people watch bowls because they are the only game in town. If you like watching college football, the bowls are pretty much your only option from Christmas until after New Years.
But bowls are essentially profit-making exercises that rely on TV revenue. The amount of money a network is willing to pay for the Outback Bowl is going to plummet as the TV ratings take a huge hit. Sponsorships are going to dry up as corporations attach themselves to the tournament. The bowl organizers will watch their revenue sources leave and will find it hard to continue. The NIT was going out of business until its last ditch antitrust lawsuit got it bought out by the NCAA.
December 3rd, 2007 at 11:58 pm
“But if you want to create a playoff in the world as it actually exists, you have to get the votes of the small conferences. And that poses problems.”
Sure… and each of the “problems” you’ve come up with there are very easy solutions to.
It’s hard to believe that there are still people out there who don’t think a playoff would “work”. Of course it would work. There’s nothing usual about football that D-I basketball doesn’t face — and they manage to put on a decent little show come February and March.
Would everyone be happy with it? No, probably not, but at least we’d have a real national champion.
One of the worst things about the current system is you put kids out there, working 60+ hours a week, getting paid (essentially) minimum wage, to make money for Myles, their school, their conferences, and dozens of other folks… and at the end of the day, they have to impress computers and people who don’t even watch the football games before they vote if they want a shot to be a national champion.
In the every other college sport, all you have to do is win.
December 4th, 2007 at 2:27 am
Touche!