Bowl Championship Series

The AP & USA Today rankings are out, and as usual, they are baffling. The AP poll has some semblance of sanity while the USA Today poll took a long ride on the crazy train. First off we have Oklahoma State above Houston, though Houston is undefeated and Oklahoma State has one loss, to Houston. Similarly they have Penn State above Iowa, Iowa is undefeated and Penn State has one loss, to Iowa. And lastly Cal above Oregon, both have one loss but Oregon beat Cal head to head. There is no reasoning behind the rankings the way they are now, except for which schools are 'supposed' to be better, or how the pollsters predict the teams will fare throughout the rest of the year. Unfortunately the polls aren't supposed to measure potential, they are supposed to reflect performance, which they clearly don't.

The fact that we have pre-season rankings sets the entire system up for this kind of behavior though. The first week the rankings are based off of nothing more than the teams potential. Come the second week a game has actually been played and a more objective ranking can take place, but since pollsters don't want to make a seismic shift in their rankings because that would cast doubt on the validity of the first weeks rankings, the second week rankings are based largely off the first weeks rankings which in turn were based off pretty much nothing. This makes it very hard for say, a lowly ranked Iowa to sneak past a highly ranked Oklahoma despite their actual performances later in the year.

It would make much more sense to release the polls later in the season when actual on the field performance can be accounted for, the official BCS polls do this but they are mainly based off of polls that have pre-season ranking anyways. I know this will never happen, because without rankings its hard to market those early season heavyweight fights between Ohio State & USC. Much easier to get TV rankings when you can say #3 vs #8.

Now to switch gears, I mentioned the BCS earlier. And if the pre-season polls are way of screwing teams earlier in the season, the BCS is the way to screw teams late in the season. A tournament is so plainly obvious that every single major sport uses it, except for division I-A college football. Just to illustrate how deep the problem is, the idea to pit the #1 ranked team in the country against the #2 team in the country didn't happen until 1998, over a hundred years after the sport began, and if it took that long for that novel idea to take hold we can tell that a tournament is no were in the near future.

Why has college football been stuck in such a strange system for so long? Money. Which masks itself in tradition. Bowl games, which were simple inventions to capitalize on the popularity of college football after the regular season have taken a deep and entrenching hold. Initially these games were played after the national championship was already decided. Then to add to their significance and marketability the final rankings were decided after the bowl games. Big football conferences and big football bowls signed lucrative contracts with each other, for a long time this prevented any significant meeting of teams post season. As an example, in 1997 undefeated Nebraska and undefeated Michigan played in separate bowls because their conference's had tie ins with different bowls. Both finished the season undefeated and both shared the national title, despite what a lucrative game a match up between the two schools could have been.

The very next year along came the BCS to swoop in to save the day introducing the novel idea of pitting the #1 vs the #2 team. How did they manage this while preserving precious college football bowl tradition? They tied in the biggest and most lucrative bowls with the biggest and most lucrative football conferences. In short they did nothing to preserve tradition, but they did plenty to make sure that the traditional monetary powerhouses preserved their lucrative post season contracts. The smaller bowls were marginalized even more and very little was added to the clarity of the national championship picture, nearly every year a team worthy of competing for the national title is left out in the cold; Utah, Boise St, Auburn. The BCS has even resulted in a split national championship(LSU & USC in 2004), the very thing the BCS was meant to prevent. The BCS did take a step in the right direction, but it is a 100 year long baby step.

The most confusing thing about the whole situation is that the current BCS format could easily be converted into a playoff system with little change. Simply select the 8-10 teams the exact way they are selected now and have them play in their respective bowl games as they do now. Then have them play another round of games after than, and then a final national championship game. This would preserve the 'tradition' of the major conference tie ins and still give a change for the deserving third ranked team to play for the national title. It is far from fair in simply playing the top eight teams in a tournament, but it would be a giant leap in the right direction. Those two additional games would also add huge revenues to the coffers of everyone involved.

There are three major arguments to this arrangement, firstly that it marginalized the other bowls. Which I can only say, give me a break. The other bowls are already marginalized as far as they can go, no one cares about the Music City or International Bowl. Adding a tournament won't increase their insignificance.

The other argument is that it lengthens the football season and adds additional stress on student athletes. This is undeniable, but the NCAA has already done this with meaningless conference championship games and an even more meaningless 12th game to the regular season, which schools use to play meaningless cream puff teams. These games could easily be eliminated to elevate the stress of those extra games.

The final argument against the tournament, is that college football already has the greatest tournament - it's regular season. That's great, but it's a tournament that decides nothing. That would be like ending the NFL's season after the conference title games right before the super bowl, why play the super bowl they already had a great season up to that point? It's argued that it would marginalize the regular season games. This isn't true in the slightest, as parity in college football is too great now, and one loss can drop you 8 rankings easily. So even if you were sitting high at #1, you aren't going to sit out a game to rest because even with one loss you could potentially lose out on a tournament spot.

I know tons of people agree with me, even influential people like the President of the United States. But none of us are doling out the multi-million dollar TV contracts, so our say doesn't really matter. Besides, it's tradition.

Thanks to flickr user wacko for the picture.

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