Well, here we are again, the end of a college football season and once more no legitimate champion. No, you say, Auburn beat Oregon in the battle of the undefeated. That produced a champion. Oh yeah, what about the other undefeated team, Texas Christian, the team with the best defense in the country. Everybody knows that defense wins championships so how come The Horned Frogs, now 13-0 aren’t in the championship?
We could go on with this conversation forever but everyone knows that the Bowl Championship Series is neither a series nor a producer of champions. It’s one game played between two teams who happen to have good records and the right conference affiliation. It is the biggest fraud in American sports and what makes it worse is that other than a concentration of power, there is no logical reason for its existence.
Right now there are five bowls, called the BCS bowls that have all the prestige and make most of the money. These bowls rotate the championship each year so that none of them feel left out, Then there are over twenty five other bowls that are more or less paydays for the schools that play in them but which, unless they can put together a rivalry like this year’s Sun Bowl of Miami VS Notre Dame, mean nothing. So right now you have a setup where one bowl has real significance, four others have some interest and the rest are just going through the motions, giving the kids a trip to someplace they wouldn’t ordinarily go and making them play a game for that privilege when many of them would rather be home with their families for Christmas.
But let’s look at a 16 team playoff that would give real significance to a sport that desperately needs a true champion not an appointed one. That would mean eight games in week one, four games in week two, two games in week three and 1 game for the real championship in week four. That’s fifteen games that really mean something as opposed to one that sort of means something and thirty or so that mean squat. That means four weeks of hype leading up to a real championship. That means the best team really being the best team because they have won that title on the field not in front of some phony big shot’s computer.
There was a time when at least the top five bowl games had some significance. That was when the national champion was picked after the bowls and when the result of more than one game could have a significant influence on who got to be crowned champion. Not anymore. Now they tell you that the game on 1/10/11 will crown the champ despite the fact that there will still be another major college that is undefeated.
The main reason there are a lot of bowls now is that they provide a payday for college sports programs badly in need of a financial boost, they bring tourist dollars to the city that hosts them and advertising dollars to the networks, usually ESPN, that carry them on the tube. Okay, that’s fine but can you imagine how all those dollar figures would be inflated if the games, at least the fifteen that were part of the series, actually meant something.
I flipped through most of the bowl games that were on the tube this year and almost all of them had a lot of empty seats and that includes the Orange Bowl. Who actually thinks that there would be any empty seats in a bowl game that had real significance? How much more important would that Orange Bowl game have been if both Stanford and Virginia Tech were playing it for a shot at the title?
Okay, so what are the objections? Well, it will take some power away from the phony bums who are currently running the show. Then it will make the bowls that are not participating even more insignificant, (hard to believe) than they are now. There is no answer to these two problems because they aren’t really problems, at least not to anyone except the phony bums who run the BCS and the schools who play in the other bowls and they, if they’re really honest with themselves already know how insignificant those games are. They just don’t care as long as they get paid.
The two objections that could be said to have some basis in reality are first; that for the two teams who play for the championship, the season will run to about sixteen games. This problem would be partly eliminated if the NCAA ruled that no team could play more than twelve games in a regular season including conference championships. That would mean that 16 teams would play thirteen games which many teams already play, 8 would play fourteen games which a few already play, 4 would play fifteen and 2 would play sixteen. If there’s a kid in this country who wouldn’t play an extra couple of games for the chance at a real national championship I don’t want him on my team. Even high schools now play thirteen or fourteen games a year depending on how far they go in their state tournaments.
The last objection has to do with the extension of the season. That’s baloney. The season doesn’t have to be extended. Right now there is a month of inactivity between the end of the regular football season and most of the bowl games. Most teams finish their schedules in November with a few extending through the first weekend in December. The NCAA, if they were actually awake for a change, could make a rule that all seasons including league championships must be finished by the weekend of Thanksgiving, thereby leaving a two week hiatus to organize traveling before the real championship series started on the second week of December. The series would continue with quarterfinals on the third weekend of December, the two semi-final games on Jan 1 and the championship game on the next weekend as it is now. The season wouldn’t have to be extended at all and the teams wouldn’t have a month layoff in which to get stale.
Yes it would be a longer, harder schedule but only for 16 teams and it would give those 16 teams a chance to play for a real national championship, a chance they do not have now. With a real goal instead of the current faux goal there would be a lot more interest and therefore a lot more money for everybody, and more important, America’s favorite pastime would have a real champion not the phony appointed one we have now.