One good thing about the BCS system

I don't think there was ever enough lag time between the announcements of the teams and the playing of the games for a cartoonist to comment on the specific matchups, back when all the games were played in a three-day orgy of college football at New Year's.

Now, Arlo & Janis has the luxury of getting in a joke under deadline.

I can't think of any other benefits of the system, which was created to solve a problem that didn't exist: The crowning of a definitive national champion in college football. Sportswriters decided this was something we needed and ginned up the concept until fans adopted it as well.

But a real playoff wouldn't work because there are too many teams and it takes too long to prepare for each game, so they came up with computer system to choose the matchups.

So now, instead of arguing over which team is the best rather than the team chosen by a poll of coaches and sportswriters, fans argue over which teams the computer should have chosen rather than the ones it did.

Which means that all it really accomplished was to stretch the season out another week and a half, helping cartoonists with their deadlines while putting an end to an enjoyable holiday tradition and replacing it with not much of anything. The game tonight will be carried on ESPN, which either means that ESPN has arrived as a major force in sports broadcasting or that the networks don't consider this stretched-out, worn-out pseudo-championship worth disrupting their prime time schedule for. 

I have great respect for ESPN, and I'm sure the game will get boffo ratings in both Oregon and Alabama, a pair of much-sought-after major markets.

Harrumph. The old ways were better.

When I was in college, we didn't chant "We're Number One!" unless there was a logical reason to claim that we were likely, in fact, to be voted the number one team in the nation that week.

And, until my junior year, my particular school, which often enough WAS Number One, didn't participate in post-season bowl games because, they said, the players needed to get back in the classroom and hit the books before finals, which came at the end of January.

This, O Best Beloved, is why they call them "The Good Old Days."

If the new system had solved the problem of deciding who was Number One, it might have been worth upsetting all the tradition. But it simply shifted the arguments from talking about football to talking about computer programs.

I liked it better when we could sit around through the off-season knowing we had been robbed, not by some stupid computer program, but by fact that Nick Eddy slipped getting off the damn train in East Lansing.

 

Comments

[Mark Jackson]

Well, the NCAA's other divisions have "real" playoffs to determine their football championships:

Division III - 16 teams
Division II - 24 teams
Division I FCS - 20 teams

I'm not arguing that Division I FBS ought to do this, rather pointing out that just because something seems unworkable doesn't mean that it doesn't already exist.

As I understand it the lack of a playoff series in Division I FBS is down to the money arrangements with the preexisting bowls, and the unwillingness of those involved - including the major colleges - to risk upsetting the cash cart.