Andrew Speaks Sports: BCS continues to create postseason with no real champ
Andrew Johansen
December 12, 2007
Filed under Uncategorized
This year’s college football season has been arguably the least predictable one in the past 30 years. More top ranked teams in the nation have fallen than ever before. It started with number five ranked Michigan losing to Appalachian State in the season opener.
Then you can talk about the number one and two ranked teams that have lost this year. Most recently, there’s Missouri and West Virginia. The week before that, it was LSU and Kansas (LSU, by the way has been in and out of the top two all year). Then there was Ohio State and Oregon, and then Boston College and South Florida. And you can’t forget about Cal and USC. If you were counting, there were 10 different teams that have occupied the top two spots throughout this season.
A season like this is just what college football needs because it exposes the Bowl Championship Series for what it is: an utter failure. Watching the polls fluctuate all season long and trying to figure out who is deserving of playing for the national championship has been more difficult than trying to master quantum mechanics.
And how does the season end? LSU and Ohio State back into the biggest game of the year, and once again we will not know who the best team in the nation is. I thought that the point of a championship is to determine who the best is, but I may be mistaken (a hint of sarcasm).
Another qualm I have about the BCS is the other bowl games as well. There are five BCS bowl games including the National Championship, Orange Bowl, Fiesta Bowl, Sugar Bowl and Rose Bowl. That makes 10 teams that are involved in a BCS bowl game. So it would make sense that the top 10 ranked teams would participate in the bowl games. Of course the BCS couldn’t allow it to be so simple. Only two teams from a conference can participate in a BCS bowl. This creates a problem when you have Oklahoma, Missouri and Kansas all in the top 10. Oklahoma is ranked fourth so they will play in the Fiesta Bowl. That leaves Kansas and Missouri. Missouri is ranked sixth in the nation and beat Kansas earlier in the season. Kansas is ranked eighth and lost one time this year, which was to Missouri. Kansas got the bid, while Missouri was left out to dry.
It makes no sense. Missouri was ranked higher than Kansas and beat them in the head-to- head match-up. All logic points to Missouri getting the BCS bid, but somehow Kansas will be in the Orange Bowl.
So who would take Missouri’s place in a bowl game? Maybe number 11 ranked Arizona State. No, the BCS couldn’t make it that simple. They couldn’t even give number 12 ranked Florida the chance to play in a BCS game. Somehow number 13 Illinois got the bid for the bowl game. So how does that make sense? Missouri got screwed because of a dumb rule, so the BCS compounded that debacle by screwing over Arizona state and Florida as well.
It’s bad enough that we don’t get the clear cut top two teams playing for it all, we can’t even get the top ten teams in the five BCS bowl games.
I can’t see the point of the BCS. Some say that it generates a lot of money, but how would a playoff not generate more money. If there would be a playoff there would be more games, thus more money. And heaven forbid, we would have a championship that would end in clarity. If there were an eight team playoff, in which the top eight teams played in a seed format, the season would extend three extra weeks if they advanced all the way to the championship. I don’t see how that is a bad thing. I see no benefits in continuing with the BCS and everyone seems to be complaining about it but there are no signs of change in the near future.
It’s bad enough that we don’t get the clear-cut top two teams playing for it all; we can’t even get the top ten teams in the five BCS bowl games.
I can’t see the point of the BCS. Some say that it generates a lot of money, but how would a playoff not generate more money? If there would be a playoff, there would be more games, thus more money. And heaven forbid we would have a championship that would end in clarity. If there were an eight-team playoff, in which the top eight teams played in a seed format, the season would extend three extra weeks if they advanced all the way to the championship. I don’t see how that is a bad thing. I see no benefits in continuing with the BCS and everyone seems to be complaining about it, but there are no signs of change in the near future.
When it is all said and done, there is a real possibility that we will never shake the BCS and we will have to endure years of illegitimate ‘champions.’
