The wait is finally over. We finally know who will be matched up in the various Bowl Championship Series games. They even had a selection show and everything. After weeks of speculation the crowning moment of the college football season arrived and we were informed the all-powerful all-important BCS system will give us epic matchups like...Georgia and Hawaii? Southern Cal and Illinois? Oklahoma and West Virginia? Well at least Missouri and Virginia Tech looks like a good matchup. Wait...what? The Tigers didn't get in? Kansas will play the Hokies instead? Didn't Missouri beat them? And didn't they beat Illinois too? Weren't the Tigers ranked #1 in the country last week?
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| Chase Daniel deserved better than the Cotton Bowl. | |
It's time to admit the BCS model is broken. Sure they get the championship game right three out of every four years, but too often there is doubt whether the right teams are matched up. Does Ohio State really deserve to be there? They didn't beat anyone ranked in the top 20. In that sense they're no more deserving than Hawaii, Arizona State, or Kansas.
But what bugs me more is the lesser BCS bowls. We're lead to believe making it to a BCS bowl is a crowning achievement for your team. But the fans are treated to matchups of teams not playing on the same levels. Georgia and USC are playing fantastic football right now. It seems like they deserve better opponents than Hawaii and Illinois. And we fans deserve better too.
It's time to institute a playoff system. Take the top 8 or 16 teams. I don't care, take the top four. Give me something better than the current system that gives me games I'll only watch if they don't conflict with Simpsons reruns. Make a game like Georgia and Hawaii some meaning.
I'm tired of all the talk about a playoff making the regular season meaningless. That's a fabricated lie. A playoff would do no such thing. In fact, a playoff would generate more excitement for the game throughout the country. The reason is that more teams would be involved in the national title hunt later into the season. Let me explain.
Look at the Oklahoma Sooners. Their hopes for a national championship took a major hit when they lost to Colorado. Whatever hopes they had left were destroyed when they lost to Texas Tech. But if we had a playoff system that gave the current BCS conference champions an automatic bid their hopes would still be alive.
If an eight team playoff were in place, the excitement this weekend wouldn't have been limited to Missouri, Columbus, Morgantown, Athens, and Baton Rouge. It would have included Norman, Knoxville, Boston, Blacksburg, and Pasedena. Beyond a playoff would have extended excitement further into the season in places like Ann Arbor, Champaign, Happy Valley, Austin, Gainesville, Madison, and Tempe as these schools would have still had a chance of qualifying for a tournament late in the season. Someone explain to me how spreading the excitement and making it last longer into the season is bad for the game?
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| They could be dreaming about more than fresh fruit in Blacksburg | |
The argument against taking the kids out of school doesn't wash either. They manage to do it in Div-IAA, Div II, and Div III and we don't hear about those poor kids flunking out of school. You could wait until after finals and have an eight team tournament over the three week winter break. I fail to see how any playoff system would take the kids out of class any more than the NCAA basketball tournament which features two weeks of games played on Thursday and Friday afternoons not to mention the classes lost to traveling for week night regular season games.
It's time for the university presidents to sit down and make a commitment to organizing the first playoff system in Div I-A football. If I had my way I would take the six champions of the Big East, Big Ten, Big XII, SEC, ACC, and PAC-10 and two at large teams outside of those conferences to include the smaller conferences and independents. You went 11-1 and didn't win your conference? Too bad. Win that game next year. If you can't win your conference you don't deserve to play for the national title.
Every other college sport has a playoff. There's no excuse for not having one in Div I-A football as well.