College Football Needs Playoffs, Not More BCS Nonsense

This is an article that was written on November 9, 2011 by Nicholas Goralka in the Washington Times. The article was released in the aftermath of a turbulent week in college football for fans in which a top ranked team lost but remained ahead in ranking of many undefeated teams. There is a system that takes the average of two human polls and one computer generated poll to determine the ranking of all college football teams. For fourteen years the BCS (Bowl Championship Series), has been this system that creates five bowl match-ups involving ten of the top ranked teams in the FBS NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision. The debate lies in the ranking of these top teams and the criteria that determines who receives a BCS bowl and who does not receive an invite. Like the quote says,

“The method to that madness is one of the nation’s biggest mysteries, but the BCS is running out of slack; teams want to know how these rankings are made.”

Goralka’s argument is for the fairness and transparency of the actual method that is used to determine these rankings. To an uninformed fan of college football, the fact that a one loss team is ranked above an undefeated team is ludicrous but in the world of college football: style points, conference membership into the Big Six (The Big East, The Atlantic Coast Conference, The Southeastern Conference, The Big Ten, The Big XII, and the Pacific-12 Conference), and strength of schedule are important factors in the BCS rankings.


Paraphrase

Goralka argument is that the BCS system is flawed to its root and does not help to determine a true champion at the end of the college football system. She believes that the algorithm that is used by the BCS computer system is a big mystery to everyone outside of the committee that runs it. She also states that the money that is generated for the BCS bowl game has a lot to do with the reason the system is not producing balanced results with regard to what teams participate in the event. Higher than average salaries that is given to the CEOs of these BCS bowl games also attributes to the reason why there is no playoff system for the NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS).

- Premise #1: A postseason system in which an undefeated regular season can lead a team straight to a pat-on-the-back game a week before the national championship game is just laughable.

- Premise #2: Georgia, first in the SEC East and fifteenth overall, is not even ranked in one of the computer systems. Stanford, undefeated, is ranked as low as tenth.

- Premise #3: Boise State has proven that schools from minor conferences can run with the big boys with their 2-0 BCS Bowl record

- Premise #4: A bunch of rich people taking $500,000 a year to run a system that breaks the competition principles of the federal antitrust laws.”


Conclusion: The BCS is just nonsense, and if they never embrace a playoff system, then college football will never crown a true national champion.

Analysis

The author states that she believes that teams like Boise State, Georgia, Stanford, and Oregon wants to get down to the bottom of the complex BCS system to find out why a one-loss team is ranked higher than their prospective school. Whereas publicly none of these schools has complained about their rankings in the BCS system. Boise State and TCU has even pursued a move to one of the Big Six conferences to play football, hopefully to obtain a easier path to the BCS National Championship Game. Goralka also defines corruption as someone who is paid a $500,000 salary to perform his job, which in this case is as a BCS bowl official. Although her points are easy to side with, her foundation is flawed.

The author uses hasty generalization to assume that these teams are upset with the BCS system even though they signed an agreement to conform to the formation of the BCS system. There are 120 teams in the FBS who are eligible to be in a BCS bowl game and there are ten teams that will participate in the BCS bowl games. I do not think you can scrap a system because a few teams have come up short in the polls. There are flaws in the BCS system but the same can be said for any tournament or playoff where teams are ranked. The idea that a system is corrupt because someone gets paid a certain salary is a hasty generalization on the character of these individuals without any concrete explanation or reason to support that belief. Many college football fans wants a playoff system but to completely overhaul a system that has taken more that ten years to create would have to have major violations of Anti-Trust laws.

The BCS system has many cracks and holes in it for mid-major college football programs but I would not burn down a house that needs to be repaired. The current system allows teams that do not make it to a BCS game to still play in a significant bowl game without it being overshadowed by a playoff series that would take a month to play.Better yet follow the lead of schools like Boise State, Houston, and TCU who are planning on entering one of the Big Six conferences. The article is passionate and but is in critical condition because of the aforementioned reasons and like a handyman would say that just fixed some cracks in the roof, "that just about does it".