Imagine you are hiking and you come to a hill. The path goes right over the hill to the other side. Most hikers wouldn’t think twice about going up and then down the hill to the other side. It’s just part of hiking.
That’s not what the NCAA would do, though. They would stop hiking, then hire someone to drill a tunnel through the hill. Once the tunnel was built, they’d debate whether they even wanted to finish the hike or not.
This is essentially the approach the NCAA has taken with picking a college football champion in the Football Bowl Subdivision. After working hard all season to facilitate a healthy, competitive atmosphere, they get to the part of the season when they have to pick a national champion. Instead of doing it themselves, they essentially outsource the duties to the conferences and the bowls. These groups have come up with their own unwieldy system to pick a champion called the Bowl Championship Series, more commonly referred to as the BCS. The NCAA, however, never even uses this system to officially crown a champion. Instead, the BCS and media make the final call. Thus, the NCAA’s inactivity results in a big sloppy jumble assigned with picking a college football champion.
The BCS uses various polls and computer formulas to determine who can play in which bowl games. Each of these bowl games serves as a sort of surrogate postseason, attempting to pit two evenly matched teams against each other in a single game. The net result is that only the two teams determined by the computers and polls to be worthy of the BCS National Championship Game have a shot at the title. Everyone else gets to fight to be one of the runners-up.
Like using the path to hike over the hill, there has always been a logical way to conquer the task of determining a national champion: a playoff pitting several of the best teams against each other. Just about every major sport on every level uses this system in some capacity. It’s absurd that the FBS hasn’t used it in college football.
And yet, here we are, 10 years after the inception of the BCS, and they’re still working on finishing the tunnel. You see, the tunnel has had its fair share of problems — the supports have crumbled and caved in multiple times. The BCS keeps assuring us that it’s safe and stable, but the falling clumps of dirt suggest otherwise.
Nearly every season since the BCS has been implemented has seen some major controversy or disagreement. In its first season, 1998, a one-loss Kansas State missed out on all four of the major bowls. 2000, 2001 and 2003 each saw one-loss teams with reasonable claims to the title games – Miami, Oregon, and USC respectively — denied a shot at the championship. Another nefarious incident occurred in 2004 when undefeated Auburn was left out of the title game and finished 14-0, yet ranked second in the polls. Finally, 2006 and 2007 each resulted in wild finishes that further highlighted the absurdities of the BCS.
The biggest victims of the system aren’t the schools from the major conferences, but the schools from the little conferences. Look at Utah in 2004 and Boise State in 2006. Each team went the entire season undefeated, including a win at a major bowl game, but was never in consideration for the title game because of its weak schedule. Who says teams of less prestigious pedigrees are any less worthy of a shot at a championship? The Utes and Broncos each conquered every challenge given to them, but still ended up ranked lower than other teams.
There have been so many controversies surrounding the BCS that you’d think the NCAA would step up and take control of crowning a football champion. But the organization, usually so proficient and effective, just sits there.
A few arguments have been tossed out against the idea of a playoff system. First, the sponsorship-bloated bowl games generate a lot of money and coverage, and the NCAA doesn’t want to lose this. Interest in a football playoff would be so big, though, that I’m sure it would ultimately earn as much or more than the current system if implemented properly.
It’s also been said that the bowl system is special, that playing in a bowl holds a special value for schools and athletes. People, however, said the same thing about the National Invitation Tournament before the NCAA basketball tournament known as March Madness began to ascend as the elite post-season tournament. College basketball’s playoff system is now regarded as one of the most exciting and successful in sports. A football playoff could be just as exciting.
There’s no reason bowl games need to be scrapped completely. They can work similarly to how they do now, with specific conference tie-ins on an invitational basis. However, there needs to be a tournament separate from the bowls to decide the champion. It’s the only natural and logical step at this point.
If the NCAA needs ideas about how to implement it, here’s one: take the 11 conference champs and a single at-large team. Seed them using the computers and polls the BCS seems to love so much. Then, set these 12 teams up in a bracket with the top four teams earning byes. The NCAA can trim the season length from 12 games to 11, like it used to be, if they don’t want football to drag on for quite that long.
Don’t expect to the NCAA to adopt this idea or any other intelligent set-up in the near future, though. They trust their tunnel through the hill more than ever, even as it constantly threatens to crumble right on top of them.
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