Division I college football is one of the most exciting sports to experience firsthand or watch on television. The atmosphere is unbelievable. The bands are playing, 100,000 people are shouting. There are parties all around the surrounding area for days. The players play for pride, not cash or egotism (in most cases). It’s what many call the purest sport that exists. There’s only one problem with it. Division I; unlike all the other divisions of college football, does not have a postseason playoff system. Rather, the teams that get to play for a national championship every year are awarded the opportunity by a system called the BCS (Bowl Championship Series). This is a great injustice that has to be addressed immediately.
The BCS system itself is as odd and senseless a system as it is unfair. The BCS is basically what you would call an equation where the variables are the media, college football coaches, and six computers. Members of the media and coaches across the country vote for and rank teams from 1 to 25 A certain number of points are awarded for each vote given to a team and together that will account for two thirds of the BCS points. The other third comes from the six computers, which each use different formulas of measuring how good a team is that after hours of research make no sense whatsoever to the average person. On top of that, the highest and lowest totals of the six computers are thrown away completely leaving the last four to be averaged. Why is that? That’s a fair question that no one seems to know the answer to.
Then there is the matter of its unfairness. A small college team has no chance to win a national championship under the current format. Prestigious programs will generally earn more votes regardless of how good the team actually is (see Notre Dame), and while it is understandable that the media and coaches will not rank a school that plays weaker teams in weaker conferences high, if a team does well enough, say goes 12-0, don’t they deserve a chance to prove themselves? It would appear to be most fair if they did. One of the very few times a small conference team was invited to a major bowl (only one team from the “Little Six” conferences is invited to one of the five big bowls each year by rule) in 2006, Boise State University beat a heavily favored Oklahoma team in one of the most exciting Fiesta Bowl games ever, affirming the argument that you never know which team will win on any given day in college football.
But the BCS rarely allows such scenarios to play out. Boise State finished 13-0 last season but were shut out of the BCS picture completely. It could very well happen to them again this year and perhaps TCU as well. In fact, there have been times when the BCS has even prevented the two best teams from playing for the national title. Due to the fact that the BCS doesn’t begin to be factored until the eighth week of the season, it fluctuates wildly over a short amount of time, negatively impacting teams that lose late in the season due to the fact that they then cannot regain points by the time the season is over. This is exactly how Ohio State got into the national championship in 2008; several teams lost and by BCS rank they were hoisted up to #2 and got the chance to be pummeled by LSU. In 2005, there was even a tie in the BCS at the end of the season, which the BCS was designed to prevent, and the computers chose Oklahoma in the tiebreaker and they were promptly killed 55-19 by USC.
Hours could be spent going over the system’s flaws but this is unnecessary. The fact that several coaches of teams that have benefitted from the BCS system spoke out in favor of a playoff system instead is very telling. Urban Meyer, coach of 2007 national champions Florida, has repeatedly argued that a playoff is “most fair to everyone around the country”. Several more, such as LSU coach Les Miles and Ohio State coach Jim Tressel, have also supported switching to playoffs (though Tressel has several times recanted his feelings likely due to pressure from commissioner Jim Delaney). No argument is more compelling however than that by Penn State coach Joe Paterno, 50+ year veteran of the college football world. "To be frank with you, I don't know what the reasons are not to have a playoff," Paterno said during a speaking appearance in Pittsburgh. "You can talk about missing class and all that kind of stuff, [yet] you see basketball go on forever. You have a lot of bogus excuses, but obviously the majority of people who have the say don't want it."
The switch to a playoff just makes the most sense. All the other divisions of college football have the system and have no complaints about it. Most other college sports have a playoff system. Why Division I needs such special treatment and a system that doesn’t do its job well enough is a mystery. Why not give teams that have lost just once, or play in a smaller, less seen conference, a chance to show their true worth? What is there really to lose? Not sponsorships or money, as some greedy conference commissioners grumble, for there will be plenty of air time and advertising space to go around. There’s nothing preventing the retention of the other minor bowls for teams with worse records to allow the teams some postseason competition and TV time and money for their school. Those games don’t really count for much now in the BCS anyway.
The system proposed by Yahoo sports analyst Dan Wetzel is an excellent one that deserves wide recognition. In his system, 16 teams would advance to a playoff bracket similar to one in the NCAA Basketball Tournaments where #1 plays #16, etc. The media and coaches alone would rank teams during the regular season (no BCS) and the NCAA Committee themselves would rank the teams bracket style, also like basketball. The champions from all eleven football conferences would automatically receive bids leaving the last five spots as at large for five of the best remaining teams. This is not a perfect system, there is no such thing, but it is far fairer to everyone involved. Several experts including ESPN analyst Michael Wilbon, former Clemson coach and expert analyst Terry Bowden, and of course President Barack Obama support the switch to playoffs. Obama told 60 Minutes that “this is important…I think any sensible person would say that if you've got a bunch of teams, who play throughout the season, and many of them have one loss or two losses, there's no clear decisive winner that we should be creating a playoff system". Recent votes of the American Football Coaches Association have indicated a nationwide trend towards support for a playoff system.
This should not even be an issue in a sport as important as Division I football. The BCS is a stupid and flawed system that deserves to face a death sentence. As a sports fan I am outraged as all sports fans should be at the mere existence of this atrocity. College football needs playoffs for fairness and support for the unpredictability the sport holds every season; change is needed and the time for change is now.
fuck you
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