Someone please explain to me with a straight face how the BCS is good for college football and please include in your argument all that nonsense about how the system makes every week a playoff and how a playoff would de-value the regular season and by all means, please include that tripe about how the system has a way of working things out. I saw what you saw Saturday. If you’re going to make a pro-BCS argument, you better have a whole lotta contraband whizzing through your veins.
Never has the Bowl Championship Series been exposed like it has been this college football season. Last year about this time I wrote “you can’t spell im(B)e(C)ile(S) without BCS” and I’ll stand on that same soap box, particularly after Saturday’s games. The BCS has tweaked its system every single year since its inception in 1996 and each year they promise to get it right. Well, let’s see how they get it right after Oklahoma 38, number one Missouri 17 and unranked Pitt 13, number two West Virginia 9.
Now the people who are in charge of Roy Kramer’s bastard child have all of one day to come up with a scenario that we’re going to buy into, one that will produce the 2007 national champions. We’ll have computers whizzing away all day tomorrow and they’ll come up with a whole bunch of scenarios and we’ll have a couple of polls, one voted on by coaches who have regional and personal biases and the other a poll that includes voters who have absolutely zero connection with the college game except that they might have played 40 years ago.
And we’re supposed to buy into this and think this is good for college football.
Wait, some idiot that should be Baker Acted is going to say that the controversy is good for college football, that people will be talking college football at the water cooler for months after this weekend.
They talk about Super Bowls for months, too. Super Bowls are what you get after teams play it off on the field. You get one final game that pits the two teams that have proven they can win on the field.
But you’d rather have the Super Bowl teams picked by a computer or a popularity contest, right?
Sunday evening, two teams will be announced that will play for the national championship in New Orleans. We are to believe that these are the two best teams in all of college football and one of them will be worthy of the title national champions.
One of those teams could be the Ohio State Buckeyes. They lost only one game and even though they play in a crappy conference (see Appalachian State 34, Michigan 32 or crank up a DVD of last year’s BCS title game that reads Florida 41, Ohio State 14 if you don’t believe it) at least Ohio State is the champion of the Big Ten Conference. The Buckeyes will probably get embarrassed if they play a good team but that’s the way the weenie wiggles.
The other team could be Georgia. The Bulldogs were fourth in the BCS standings going into Saturday and they didn’t lose. They couldn’t lose. Their season is over. They played the Southeastern Conference Championship Game in Atlanta Saturday and LSU beat Tennessee. Georgia was nowhere to be found because the Bulldogs not only aren’t the SEC champs they aren’t even the SEC East Division champs.
And yet they could end up playing for the national championship and that would be an absolute travesty. If you can’t win your own conference championship you have no business whatsoever playing for the national championship.
Now, I can guarantee you that one of these so-called national experts that is shilling for the system will tell us tomorrow that IF Georgia had played LSU instead of Tennessee, that Georgia would have won. If frogs had wings, they wouldn’t bump their butts every time they jump. Georgia wasn’t there in Atlanta because the Bulldogs were given a woodshed beating by those same Tennessee Vols that lost to LSU.
They don’t deserve to play for a national championship but they could and that’s ridiculous.
Another possibility is Virginia Tech, which got hosed, 48-7, earlier this year by LSU. I would put my money on LSU to smack down Virginia Tech by a sizeable margin 10 times out of 10 if they played but Virginia Tech was ranked ahead of LSU before yesterday’s games and Virginia Tech won the ACC Championship Game over Boston College.
The Hokies have lost two games and one of them was by 41 points. That is not a team that should have a chance to play for a national championship, but Virginia Tech has a chance. And at least they are champions of a conference.
LSU went from number one in the nation last week to number seven in the nation this week, but because the Tigers beat Tennessee in the SEC Championship Game today, they have a chance to yo-yo back to number one or number two this week when the voting is done and the computers have finished running all their scenarios. LSU lost to a five-loss Kentucky team and a four-loss Arkansas team. Now granted, the Tigers are better than Ohio State, but then again, there are probably five or six SEC teams that would hose the Buckeyes.
We could get Southern Cal, which has two losses, one to a 42-point underdog. Herbie is trying to sell the Trojans as a “hot team.” He uses the same argument for Georgia.
In trying to explain all the predictions he had made that haven’t come true Saturday night, Herbie basically admitted that it’s all a guess. It is a guess. Maybe when they engrave the big trophy after the last game it will say, “2007 National Champions — We Guess.”
This is what we get instead of a playoff. A guess.
Every time the word playoff is mentioned, we get someone parroting the party line: (1) a playoff would sacrifice academic integrity; (2) a playoff would end the wonderful relationship college football has with the bowl system; (3) the college bowl experience is good for the student athlete.
Academic integrity? Please don’t make me spew my coffee through my nose. They talk academic integrity when they wildly support the NCAA basketball tournament? Kids who play in the NCAA Tournament miss one helluva lot more class time than kids would miss in a football playoff. You make the Final Four and your team, for all practical purposes, misses a month of school. And, you’re telling me that the Division I-AA, Division II and Division III teams that have been doing playoffs for more than 30 years don’t care about academics? If the academics were so draining, they would have eliminated their playoffs years ago instead of expanding them.
The wonderful relationship with the bowls and colleges? Don’t make me laugh, please. The bowls are about filling hotel rooms and juicing up the economies of the bowl-hosting communities, nothing more. What they pay out to the colleges is pittance compared to the amount of money they bring into their communities. They estimated the economic impact of the BCS National Championship Game in Glendale last year of more than $500 million. Florida and Ohio State were paid $17.5 million each, which they had to share with their conferences. That’s not good for college football. Good for college football would be a $50 million cut for each team.
The bowl experience is good for the student-athletes? That’s college president speak for “he went 7-5 and got to a bowl game. Thank God because now I don’t have to fire him” or “we’re mediocre but so are 48 other teams that got into bowl games.” It’s athletic director speak for “Thank God it’s just a bowl game because now I don’t have to try to coordinate hotel rooms and tickets for parents and families for up to four consecutive weeks” or “Thank God he got to a bowl game because now I don’t have to can him and see if I can bring in a real coach.” It’s coach speak for, “I get 15 extra practices, which is like another spring practice” or “how can you fire me? We’re going to Shreveport to play in a bowl game?”
Their arguments don’t make sense but here is reality — we aren’t going to get a playoff system anytime soon and probably never because we don’t have enough presidents, athletic directors and coaches willing to stick their necks out and demand something better.
So we’re stuck with the BCS. You can’t spell imbeciles without BCS.