Tide rising, will overwhelm BCS in coming years
The BCS has five years left, at most. The expiration date might not be specific, but events of the past month made it clear that one will ultimately be affixed to the mongrel that is college football's championship system.
Complaints about the clubby BCS and the clamor for a playoff reached critical mass in May. First came congressional hearings in which the BCS was equated with communism. Then Yahoo! Sports reported that boasts of charitable donations generated by bowl games were greatly exaggerated. Right after that, the American Football Coaches Association said it planned to take its ballots for the coaches poll, a pillar of the BCS selection process, back underground next year, withholding voters' names for the first time since 2004.
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| Texas Rep. Joe Barton's equation of BCS to communism seems dead on. (AP) |
In the past I might have quibbled with Rep. Joe Barton's communism characterization. I see the BCS as more of an aristocracy or caste system, hording riches for a select few and keeping the proletariat in its place.
But the congressman made an excellent point. Proponents of the status quo say they desperately want to protect the lower-profile games. In other words, dreams of crowning a truly meritorious champion must die so that the Meineke Car Care Bowl may live.
Holding back greatness to preserve mediocrity? That does reek of communism.
The bowl directors don't really care what I think. If they'd listened to the media on this, there would have been a playoff system in the '70s. But when a Republican congressman from Texas dusts off Cold War bombast and finds an ally in a female columnist from the loony left of San Francisco, the target is surrounded.
It's nearly impossible to find any sensible being outside the bowl system who thinks it deserves to survive in its current form. During his campaign for the White House, President Obama not only cited an eight-team playoff as the first change he'd make in the sports world, he admitted it was a very politically safe statement. Beauty-pageant contestants are thinking of using it instead of "world peace."
The concerns of the opposition aren't entirely unfounded. Some of the smaller bowl games might go under as the big boys take over two extra weekends of the TV schedule. But there would also be more space around New Year's. Lesser bowls could become the warmup act for the championship game, while (in just one of many possibilities) the Rose, Sugar, Orange and Fiesta bowls shifted to the first round of the playoffs. Or perhaps seven bowl games could constitute the playoffs, rotating the title game just as the BCS bowls do now.
In the end, we can't even be sure that the smaller bowls will suffer. If people were watching the Poinsettia Bowl on a Tuesday eight days before the New Year's bonanza, why wouldn't they watch it on the Thursday before the first round of the playoffs? Do minor bowls succeed only because they fill a craving for people who, forced to wait weeks for filet mignon, will happily chow on some ground chuck in the meantime?
That seems unlikely. Devoted college football fans usually will watch a game just because it's there. The casual fans won't watch the junk bowls unless they happen to share a household with the diehards.
A few advocates for the change wonder how they would set it up perfectly, weighing conference strengths yet not snubbing a deserving team from a weak league. That seems simple enough: The playoff won't be perfect. But it will be much better. The polls and computer rankings will still be necessary, but they will pick eight contenders rather than just two. It opens up more opportunity.
Will a ninth team be able to claim that it was cheated? Sure, but not as credibly as Boise State and Utah when they went undefeated and knew that the national title would inevitably belong to a traditional power with a loss on its record.
The only real problem is the addition of two more games for the finalists -- a lot of extra football for young bodies. Of course, the NCAA could pare the entire regular season by a game ... and in other delusions, the coaches will accept a $150,000 salary cap and every team will have two athletes in Phi Beta Kappa.
When a playoff does begin, the complaints won't go away. The basketball tournament has 65 teams, and schools still feel robbed. The same thing happens in the lower divisions of football. That's the nature of sports, and it's not what undermines the major football championship.
It's a subculture of bowl committees and local boosters. There will still be a place for them in the new football world if they can adapt to being less important than the goal of unrigged competition. If they can't, they'll be dinosaurs in five years.
Gwen Knapp is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.
