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Screw You BCS

by: TheGreenMiles

Sat Jan 01, 2011 at 10:00:00 AM EST


I love NFL football. But I'm completely disinterested in NCAA football. Why?

If you hate watching meaningful football games, you should love college football's Bowl Championship Series. Maryland played East Carolina this week at RFK Stadium. Announced attendance was 38,062, thousands below capacity - at a stadium just nine miles from the Maryland campus. Feel the bowl excitement!

If you hate Cinderella stories, you should love the BCS. Texas Christian University has gone undefeated this year, but cannot win the national title. Boise State has finished undefeated twice in recent years, both times winning the Fiesta Bowl, without being allowed a chance at the national title either time.

If you like preserving wealth & power in the hands of the privileged few over a true meritocracy, you should love the BCS. Only 14 teams have appeared in the 13 BCS Championship games, with 10 of the 26 slots going to just 3 teams (Oklahoma, Ohio State & Florida State).

College football's lack of a playoff system is one of the great enduring atrocities of modern sports. Look at it this way: Can you imagine any other sport dismantling their playoff system in exchange for a lone title game in which the participants are based in large part on subjective opinions? What if the NCAA proposed canceling the NCAA basketball tournament & just letting #1 & #2 play for the title? Or if the NFL skipped the playoffs and put the Patriots & Falcons in the Super Bowl right now?

Amazingly, the BCS still has some misguided defenders. Just listen to this convoluted defense of the system from Not Larry Sabato:
TheGreenMiles :: Screw You BCS
[L]et's explore what this season would look like with an eight team playoff.  Assuming the first rounds were held at home, with the semifinals and national championship held at neutral sites at a traditional bowl this is what we would be looking at:

(8) Arkansas at (1) Auburn
plays the winner of
(5) Wisconsin at (4) Stanford

(6) Ohio State at (3) TCU
plays the winner of
(7) Oklahoma at (2) Oregon

HOLY CRAP DOES THAT LOOK AWESOME! Wait, is NLS arguing for or against a college football playoff here? Let's see:
How is this outcome superior to the BCS?  Auburn and Arkansas already played this season- and Auburn won. The controversy of who qualifies for the BCS Championship Game today would shift to which teams qualify for the final playoff slots.  

Why should Wisconsin (11-1) and Ohio State (11-1) get road playoff games for a chance to move into position for a national championship when their co-conference champion Michigan State (11-1) wouldn't qualify for the playoffs as the #9 team in the country?  Why does PAC-10 runner up Stanford deserve a potential shot at Auburn in a semi-final game to move into a potential national championship against Oregon that already defeated them?

What this season once again shows is despite all of the complaints and teeth-gnashing about the BCS each year, the system continues to work and provide the best possible outcome.  This year the two teams that deserve to play for a national championship are Auburn and Oregon and they both will get that opportunity.

How is it superior to get 7 awesome meaningful football games and a true champion, instead of just 1 meaningful game and a champion who may have to answer critics who say TCU might've been better? And when teams play twice or more in the same season in other leagues, it's called drama & rivalry.

NLS doesn't get into it here, but BCS defenders will also say student athletes shouldn't that many games. What they ignore is that college football players already play 2-3 more games per year than they did just two decades ago. It's OK for players to play more games to fill BCS coffers, but not to give fans a true champion?

It's well past time for a college football playoff.
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Screw You BCS | 19 comments
RE: The Maryland Game (0.00 / 0)
That's not a BCS bowl and has nothing to do with the BCS.
Wow (0.00 / 0)
That's your big retort?

Read more at TheGreenMiles.com and follow me on Twitter
[ Parent ]
I can't debate (0.00 / 0)
Someone who can't even get their basic facts right!
[ Parent ]
Maybe instead we should discuss (0.00 / 0)
unranked Connecticut playing in the Fiesta Bowl today. THANK YOU BCS.

Read more at TheGreenMiles.com and follow me on Twitter
[ Parent ]
They are Big East Champs (0.00 / 0)
And the Big East is 3-1 in bowls so far despite having been rated by writers as the worst major conference this year.  So let's see how U-Conn does tonight before we bash their inclusion.
[ Parent ]
Teams should be rewarded for being good ... (0.00 / 0)
... not because they have a place in the monopoly. This is why we've spent the last 15 years watching Notre Dame get pounded in bowl games - because they're a name school, they're guaranteed better opportunities than actual good teams.

And your defense of UConn sounds like a Harris Miller apologist. Hey, he could win! Maybe he'll turn out to be not crappy! You never know!

Read more at TheGreenMiles.com and follow me on Twitter

[ Parent ]
Baseball has a similar system to BCS (0.00 / 0)
With 6 division winners and a couple of wild cards making it into the playoffs.  The only thing we are arguing over is whether there should be a playoff in college football.  I think that's absurd and ruins the "every game counts" aspect of the college football regular season.
[ Parent ]
Which is it? (0.00 / 0)
If you think the regular season is a better determinant than the playoffs, why aren't you arguing to abolish the baseball & NFL playoffs? Why is the regular season so sacred in one & not all the others?

The bowl system has always sucked. The best argument for the BCS is that it's marginally less sucky than the system it replaced. But if you were starting from scratch, you would never in a million years design a system like this.

Read more at TheGreenMiles.com and follow me on Twitter

[ Parent ]
A few key counterarguments... (4.00 / 1)
Your back-and-forth with Ben aside, there's a few key counterarguments missing here.

1) Does it really matter if you have a playoff among 8 teams out of 140+? The NCAA basketball tourney includes almost half of all teams. The only way to decide who plays a football tournament is still going to be something absurd like the the BCS rankings.

2) At least there's no more split decision crap like their used to be. You'd have the winners of the top bowl games and the #1's in various polls all bickering for top billing.

3) Extending the season by 3 games is absurd. That will lead to a whole lot of college talent getting hurt and jeopardizing their pro careers.

The BCS has been kind to Oklahoma, so I can't complain too much. I still don't care for it. That said, if you have a truly better solution, let's hear it. The root of the issue is that you really can't play more than 13 games in a college season without jeopardizing the health of your players, and there's 140+ teams.

Perhaps the solution isn't killing the BCS, but rather opening it up, making it more transparent, and tweaking it the more data we get.

There is NO Division 1-A champ (0.00 / 0)
A couple of points Dave...

Point 1: There is nowhere near 50% participation in college basketball for a NCAA championship. There are 346 Division 1 schools and this year 68 will participate in the tourney. I'll let you do the math. (Hint: near 20%)

There are 120 teams in FBS. If you put 16 in, you end up with 13% of your teams in. That's a good start.

Point 2: Not a good argument. BCS isn't about crowning a champion. It's about keeping the bowl system locked up for the big conferences to make a bunch of money. Make a tourney. That would solve your issue of no split decision.

http://www.deathtothebcs.com/s...

Point 3: Here's how you get teams in. Conference winners, all of them. They're in. Have a selection committee pick the next five, just like college basketball. Four more games max. You're worried about hurt players. You're not worried about the other division players...are you? Still worried? Cut down the schedule.

Virginia Tech this year has played 13 games and their bowl game will be the 14th. If you knock out one or two non-conference games, a team that plays for the national championship will play 15-16 games. So 2-4 teams will play past the "normal" bowl schedule. So how much talent is going to be hurt?

This is what a real tourney looks like:

http://www.ncaa.com/brackets/f...

That's how you get a real champion...not some money driven cartel.  

[ Parent ]
You're an Educator... (0.00 / 0)
So how would you handle the academic calendar of 2-3 extra games?
[ Parent ]
The same way they do it... (0.00 / 0)
in the FCS, Division II, and Division III. They somehow make it through with all the academics and still play the games. The NCAA isn't worried about their health or academics. What everybody is worried about in the FBS is the money. That's it.

Here is the bracket for the FCS...aren't exams happening around this time? Twenty teams in FCS.

http://www.ncaa.com/brackets/f...

Here's DII (24 Teams):

http://www.ncaa.com/brackets/f...

Here's DIII (32 Teams):

http://www.ncaa.com/brackets/f...


[ Parent ]
Again (0.00 / 0)
It's OK with you to add games for 100+ to make more money for the athletic programs, which has already happened & you're fine with it. But add a couple of extra games for a handful of schools to actually determine a champion and all of the sudden you're all WON'T SOMEONE THINK OF THE CHILDREN.

Read more at TheGreenMiles.com and follow me on Twitter
[ Parent ]
the myth of the student-athlete in Division 1-A sports (0.00 / 0)
Now you're getting absurd.

Academics have absolutely nothing to do with BCS/FBS/Division 1-A football.  This is a semi-pro sport, pure and simple.  They are there to play football.

Use 12 or 16 teams, with byes for the top 4 in the 12-team playoff.  The stupid nutty bowls can still get the also-rans (a/k/a NIT in basketball), and the high profile bowls serve as hosts for the playoff games, leading to the Championship Game in the Rose Bowl.

[ Parent ]
to further this point (0.00 / 0)
The Ivy League chooses not to participate in the FCS (Division 1-AA) playoffs, even though their top team may qualify (this year UPenn was in the Top 20 all season).

So if a school chooses to place academics first, they can go the Ivy League route and skip bowls and/or playoffs every year.

[ Parent ]
TCU turned out to be pathetic... (0.00 / 0)
A 2 point win over an undermanned Wisconsin team?  In their game of the year?  That's who everyone was crying tears for?
That's how you decide a true national champ (0.00 / 0)
In NotLarrySabato's brain!

Read more at TheGreenMiles.com and follow me on Twitter
[ Parent ]
Has anyone ever thought they saw The Green Miles hair somewhere before? (0.00 / 0)
America's obsesssion with winners (0.00 / 0)
I've never fully understood the obsession in American sports with knock-out competitions and rankings that allow some team or some player to be glorified as the 'best.' Come on, it's sports, not a life-or-death struggle among gladiators. Yeah, the BCS is messy and could be rationalized, but national college playoffs would put even more strain on college athletic programs. It would ratchet up the professional side of college football, too, which to my mind would be moving in the wrong direction. The better solution would be to eliminate some of the lesser bowl games and tweak the existing system.  
Screw You BCS | 19 comments
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