Last night Auburn won the BCS National Championship making that 5 straight years that an SEC team won the title. Also, the SEC is undefeated in the BCS title game and has 7 overall championships. I am not willing to even entertain an argument that suggests that the SEC isn't the best conference in college football. It's not really that close. What strengthens the argument is that those 5 straight titles have been won by 4 different teams. The Big Ten has one legitimate team year in and year out, Ohio State. The Big 12 has two, Oklahoma and Texas. The SEC has at least 5 and some may argue 7, but I digress.
There is considerable banter about the BCS and how terrible it is. The ground swell is for some sort of playoff system for college football. Well, here's my take on the whole mess. First, the BCS has been right far more that it has been wrong since its inception. You have to keep in mind, the entire goal of the BCS system was to get the two best teams in the country into the national championship game. The previous system never did that, if you'll remember, and that's why you had split and contested national championships. At the very least, we get the two best teams in the country playing each other every year. But let's look at realistic alternatives, the likely outcome of the ground swell for a playoff is going to be a 4 team playoff. This year, you would've had Auburn, Oregon, TCU and probably Wisconsin. That would mean that we would have one more game to play, TCU vs Auburn to decide it all. That would be an entertaining match up, but then what about Ohio State? Michigan State? Boise St? Stanford? All of those teams only lost once and since there wouldn't be room in a four team playoff for all of them, someone would have to decide which of those one loss teams gets left out and which lucky one gets a shot. I've heard the argument that deciding who gets left out of 4th place is better than who gets left out of 1st, but is it really? There have only been a few instances of a team who has a legitimate complaint about being kept out of the title game, think Auburn in '04, TCU this year; but every year there are 4 or more teams that could demonstrate a legitimate claim to the 4th spot in a 4 team playoff.
The other argument I hear is that there are too many bowl games. Really? Too many bowl games? Too much college football? I've never heard anyone say that the NIT is "too much basketball." Here's a tip, if you don't like the bowl games, don't watch. Chances are, they aren't for you anyway. The bowls are an unbelievable experience for everyone involved. The players and coaches are rewarded for having a good, if not great, season. The fans get a chance to travel and spend time with the team and the host cities experience an influx of cash from all the visitors. Remind me, what about that is so inherently evil? Wait, maybe we want to have a 16 or even 32 team playoff. That would actually be fun, the match ups would be unbelievable and the games would be intense! But here's the problem, there are 119 teams that play football at the D1 level. If there was a 32 team playoff, that would mean that 87 of those teams would be left out every year. Further, of those 32 teams, at least half of them would virtually never miss the playoffs. The Florida's, Alabama's, Texas', Oklahoma's, Ohio State's, USC's, Virginia Tech's of the world are not missing the playoffs very often. Sure, Boise State and TCU would have gotten in this year, but no one else from those "lower" conferences would. You think the system is elitist now? Take a look at the lower football divisions and tell me how many different faces are showing up in those playoffs and doing something. Add to that the extra weeks of practice that the playoff bound teams would be allowed and the cycle becomes harder to break.
Don't misunderstand me, I don't think the BCS is perfect, but it is a whole lot better than the old system in a lot of ways. I do think it represents the best of both worlds. There is still some cache attached to going to and/or winning the Rose Bowl, Sugar Bowl, Orange Bowl and Fiesta Bowl. Coaches can use those games as recruiting tools and the players can have a great experience participating in them. Yet we still have a championship game that crowns a champ. I don't understand why we have to install a system that basically rewards only one team. We still have a national champ, and in the 13 seasons since the BCS came to be, the BCS "got it right" no fewer than 11 of those times.
The final piece of this argument, for me, is the diminishing of the regular season. It's inarguable that NCAA football has the best and most meaningful regular season in organized athletics. You think that Texas vs Texas Tech game a few years back would have been as meaningful if there had been a playoff? What about the Boise St. vs Va Tech game at the beginning of the season? Or what about the UT vs OU games of the past? The point is, if there were a playoff, a team could slip up once or even twice and still have a shot at the title. College football would start to walk down the path of college basketball where the regular season literally doesn't mean anything. A team in college hoops can, in some conferences, not have a single conference win in the regular season yet win four games in a tournament and advance to the national tourny. Some may argue that they love that about basketball, but I'd rather have a team that won 26 games throughout the regular season and maybe had one off shooting night in a tournament get that spot in the NCAA's. People argue that bowls are nothing more than end of season exhibitions, and they are right, but the regular season in football is king. Personally, I'd rather have those exhibitions at the end of the year in a one game scenario than spread throughout an entire season.
As a football fan, I would love to see the playoffs. I'd love to see the games. But as a fan of college athletics, and football in general, I'm not willing to give up the greatest regular season going AND all of the great bowl match ups that we get every year just so that we can say that we have a system that find the "true" national champion. I hear the word opportunity thrown out a lot, as in Boise and TCU deserve an opportunity to play for the title. Think about the big picture here, if we institute a playoff aren't we, on some level, minimizing opportunities for the large majority of college football to experience the post season? Even if that post season is a glorified exhibition.
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