Bull Crap; Shit

OK, so not the most creative title I've ever come up with. However, I feel it is still very fitting to describe the travesty that is the college football postseason. Yeah, I admit it, the system kind of worked this year, but only for the title game as far as I'm concerned. I've watched a lot of college football this season, and it's pretty obvious to me that Texas against USC would make the best single-game championship. It should be a great game, and I'm really looking forward to it. But what about the other BCS bowls? Not so much. Let's take a look.

With four BCS bowls, there are eight teams that get to share in the national spotlight. These bowls bring schools BIG money and immeasurable amounts of recruiting appeal, so with 8 spots to fill, it's the eight best teams in the country that get to go, right? Well, no.

Here are the final BCS standings for the year:
1) USC
2) Texas
3) Penn State
4) Ohio State
5) Oregon
6) Notre Dame
7) Georgia
8) Miami

And here are the matchups for the four BCS bowl games:
Rose: USC v. Texas
Orange: Penn St. v. Florida St.
Sugar: West Virginia v. Georgia
Fiesta: Notre Dame v. Ohio St.

Alright, the Rose Bowl is solid. The Fiesta Bowl is good. But look at the Orange and Sugar Bowls - FSU and W.Va? WTF? That's right; thanks to the ridiculous conference tie-in system of the BCS, these guys get a free pass to the big time. Sorry Oregon and Miami. Now I'll admit that the Orange Bowl's Paterno/Bowden matchup is quite intriguing, and I'm really looking forward to seeing my surrogate team of the season dismantle an FSU team I hate with every fiber of my being. But did you see FSU this year? They played slightly-less-crappy than Miami to win in the season opener, went on a spectacular 3 game losing streak, then re-exposed an overrated Va.Tech team in the ACC Championship game. And West Virginia? They had one quality win all year (over Louisville) and generally just coasted through an awful Big East lineup.

You may be saying to yourself, "but these conference title games act as a kind of playoff, so in the end all of these teams deserve to be there." Well, if you are saying that, then you are wrong and/or mentally retarded. First of all, not every conference has a title game, so teams from conferences that do are actually penalized in a way by having to play an additional quality opponent. Also, some conferences are just plain better than others. This season the Big East does not deserve to have a team go to the BCS. Period. And as much of an ACC fan as I am, even I can admit that it's questionable whether any of those schools deserve to be in the top 8 either.

What's the answer then? I know this is basically beating a dead horse, but we NEED a REAL playoff. I just don't understand all of the arguments against it: The players would miss too much school; the season would run through February; etc; etc. I just think it's funny that Division I-AA, Division II, and every other division on down the line can have a true playoff without bringing about the apocalypse.

And it really wouldn't take any huge changes to make a playoff work. First, cut the regular season down to 9 games, or 10 if there's a conference championship game. It's really simple: just cut out those early-season non-conference junk matchups. Would anyone really miss watching Texas take on LA Lafayette, or LSU facing Appalachian St.? No, they wouldn't. Not one bit.

After reducing the schedule, we really don't even need to change the BCS rankings formula. Just throw away the asinine conference tie-ins, and take the top 8 teams to the playoffs. The BCS rankings would serve as the seeding mechanism. Unfortunately, the computer elements are a necessary evil given the limited number of games each year, (I think you would need at least a 20 - 25 game schedule for each team to get an accurate ranking system based on head-to-head matchups alone), so they stay.

Under this system, I imagine this year's playoffs to play out as follows:

Saturday, Dec. 10
The (fill in any one of the meaningless corporate sponsorship names out there) Bowl
#1 USC v. #8 Miami
The (**see above**) Bowl
#4 Ohio St. v. #5 Oregon
The (**see above**) Bowl
#2 Texas v. #7 Georgia
The (**see above**) Bowl
#3 Penn St. v. #6 Notre Dame

Saturday, Dec. 17
Sugar Bowl
#1 USC v. #5 Oregon (I hate OSU, so they get upset in the first round)
Orange Bowl
#2 Texas v. #3 Penn St.

Saturday, Dec. 31
Rose Bowl
#1 USC v. #3 Penn St. (Mack Brown is a tool, so bye-bye Texas)

Champion: USC (Reggie Bush may or may not actually be mortal)

I just don't see why that wouldn't work. Sure the ultimate result is probably the same as what we'll get in real life, but look what we're missing out on along the way. The season is essentially the same length, there's no way the ad revenues and ticket sales from those games wouldn't be astronomical, and we would get an even betterreason to drink heavily on New Year's Eve. It's a win-win-win situation. Jeez, you could even start the whole thing up a week earlier and expand the field to 16 teams. How intense would that be? And we could still have all of the other minor bowl games for the teams that don't make the playoffs, too. I think fans would still treat these other bowls as an excuse to travel and a way to give closure to the season, just as they do now.

I've heard Congress is actually thinking about getting involved with the BCS much the same way as it did for the steroid problem in baseball. And after seeing the major improvements to MLB's drug policy that came largely as a result of Congress's pressure, I think there really may be a potential for big changes to the BCS system. Now if only I could get a couple of Congressmen to start reading this blog...