The Annual College Football Needs a Playoff Column

The dust has settled. A bunch of 7-5 teams are going to December bowl games. In the rapture that follows being invited to the Meinike Car Care Bowl, teams will talk about how it is a reward for their fans, and benefit to the school - and then around game time we’ll see the stories that show how the school actually ends up losing money by the time they pay all the expenses involved in the trip out to Boise or Charlotte, etc.

This year there are 34 bowl games - meaning that 68 teams had to become “bowl eligible” or some poor bowl was going to feature East Carolina playing an inter-squad scrimmage. For a while there, it was touch and go, in part because the schools in Division 1 (the NCAA can label them whatever they want, here we will speak the truth) have gotten addicted to scheduling 1-AA games to pad their victory totals. The season as expanded to 12 games (13 for teams in their conference championships) - apparently solely to allow everybody to schedule a game with The Citadel.

The Appalachian State upset of Michigan in 2007 was so sweet because it was the ultimate come-uppance for the Division 1 schools. You weren’t content with the Big 10 cupcakes on your schedule, or some of the MAC schools in your own state; you reached into the ranks of 1-AA to get that first win of the season, and you still haven’t been able to wipe the egg off your face. I love it!

(Don’t take this the wrong way, 1-AA schools:) I’m always reminded of the story of the lion who was challenged to a fight by a skunk. For weeks, the skunk strutted around boasting that he was going to take on the mighty lion, but the lion said nothing. Finally, when all of the other animals had heard enough of the skunk’s bragging, they went to the lion and asked him to fight the skunk so that order and peace could be restored. The lion refused still, and said “it isn’t that I fear somehow losing the fight, it is simply that for months I’ll wake up every morning to the smell reminding me that I fought a skunk.”

No one is impressed when a Division 1 school rolls over the 1-AA team that they’ve paid to take a beating; the alumni who puff out their chests at that probably crowed about how the US took down Grenada; you know, morons. Take a chance on Vanderbilt or Miami of Ohio, or just admit that you want a win without any real upside and schedule the local 5A high school team.

But I was talking about the bowls. Fortunately for all concerned, something like 74 teams have managed to win six games against Division 1 schools (or maybe this year it is only five), and every bowl can have two teams. And each and every one of us gets to ask - Who freaking cares? My alma mater is going to a bowl game, somewhere, one day in December, and if I was looking for a short vacation in city better known for conventions than tourism, I might think “hey, now I’ve got an excuse to go to Memphis.”

The college bowls are a quaint relic of a by-gone era - like the Electoral College or the 8-track tape. There was a time when the games were played for fun, and watched for fun and at the end of the year, some of the better teams got together in a warm weather city to play one more game for the alumni who never got a chance to see teams from the Mid-west. The outcome was secondary to the experience.

Why has the number of college bowls grown while they have been simultaneously rendered meaningless? It is an interesting question for social psychologists. My own suspicion is that the increasing number of bowls has more to do with Chambers of Commerce and commercial sponsors than the desire of every team with six wins to spend December practicing. The teams get sucked into the idea of having a bowl game as a reward for the season, and nobody actually tries to figure out if the money and time would be better spent upgrading the field hockey team.

I’m not advocating eliminating the consolation bowls. It is a wild waste of resources for all involved to create another of 7-5 teams in a city nobody wants to go to, so that ESPN can have live programming on the 27th of December. But if that’s how people want to spend their time, effort and money, then it is their God-given right as Americans.

For a handful of teams, though, the bowl game was a final chance to show that they deserved consideration to be NATIONAL CHAMPION. After all, that is the ultimate goal of every team when they suit up for two-a-days in August. In the pre-BCS days, two or three of the bowl games were important in helping sort out the chaff and identify the two or three teams that could then argue until eternity that they should have been deemed NATIONAL CHAMPION. So there were two or three bowl games that were more than just watching college football on New Years’ Day.

But like everything else that gets swept up in our hyper-competitive society, it wasn’t enough to have a system that created endless arguments about the merits of this or that team. We needed to be able to get consensus on who would be the NATIONAL CHAMPION. And so the Bowl Championship Series was created.

One of the problems with the BCS is that the name implies something that it simply isn’t - a series. And I think that this poor job of labeling part of the problem people have with the system. If they had simply called it the “Bowl Matchup Improvement System” then there would be less argument about the BCS itself. Not less argument about why major college football remains the only sport where no champion is determined on the field, just less bitching about the system itself.

The BMIS has always been an excellent idea. It has prevented the odd results of the 80s and early 90s, such as when BYU was awarded a NATIONAL CHAMPION after beating a 6-5 Michigan team in the Holiday Bowl. Now we frequently get games everyone wants to see, if not an actual championship matchup. And the BMIS has pointed the way to the easiest solution to determining the NATIONAL CHAMPION. Because we need to set up a system for determining a champion, if only to shut everyone the hell up.

For a very long time, I have been advocate of college football without a tournament. My reason is that I think having people argue about whether Florida is better than Texas or USC is better than both is just lots of fun to watch. But I’ weird like that, I like debate and controversy. But I have come around to join (well, face it, just about everyone) the side calling for a change. Again, if only to shut down the argument - because the argument consists of the emotional pull of having a real champion against several lame justifications for not having a champion.

This year has been the best rebuttal ever to the “a playoff would devalue the regular season” argument. Florida, Texas, Oklahoma, Texas Tech, USC and Penn State all have one loss and undefeated Utah may be as good. The regular season was meaningful, in separating the wheat from the chaff - remember when East Carolina was supposed to breeze its way to a perfect record and crash the major-conference’s little bowl party; the regular season took care of that. The regular season did what it does in every other sport, separate the contenders from the pretenders.

Want an even better rebuttal? The NFL last season featured a Patriots team that went undefeated, piled up the most points in history, and generally was everyone’s choice for champion. If the NFL post-season had been one round of games, they would have played Dallas or Green Bay or Indianapolis and the winner of that would have won topped the polls unanimously. The eventual champion, about whom there is no debate, was the New York Giants, who at 10-6 would have been matched up against Cleveland in the Outback Bowl at 11:00 on New Year’s Day, and after winning that game would still not have been in the conversation.

So it is time for change. Hey, this is the year for it. And because the BMIS has done such a good job, the first solution, in the twelve-step program for college presidents and the sycophants who think that the current system is satisfactory, is at hand. (The first step for each of you people is to admit that you have a problem - “I’m John [Swofford] and I’m an enabler of buffoons.”)

The current system actually does a good job of identifying who we all want to see in the championship game. The current crop of bowl games features some compelling matchups and every year, so it seems, it is clear after those bowls who is really worthy of a shot at the title.

This idea is fairly easy to implement, since it is based on exactly the system currently in place. and has to be more satisfying than the current system. Four New Years’ Day bowl games - Orange, Sugar, Rose and Fiesta - with the four winners being considered, on the merits of their play in those games, for the championship game, played on January 8 (or if that’s a weekend on the following Monday night).

It is possible that the four bowl games won’t sort everything out so that the championship game is really the game we all want to see, but the odds are so much better than under the current system. Meanwhile, these big-daddy bowl games keep their stature, because the game has some real impact on the possible national championship.

I don’t advocate seeding the four bowl games from the BCS top eight, though, because that will almost assure debate about who should be in the championship game. The top three or four have usually distanced themselves from the next group; match them up in some fashion. The winners head to the championship game. And since we already have a rotation in place amongst the bowls, the two bowls which don’t get the top matchups this year get dibs on the top matchups next year. Under the current system, maybe one of the four big-daddy bowls has a top matchup, but the bowls are fine with the system. So let’s not spill any tears on their behalf.

I’m not saying this is new - it’s been around for a while as the “plus 1" system. And I’m not saying that it is the best and final answer. But it is a good step from the current mess to a true playoff, which is where the sport ultimately needs to go. And it would have the benefit of making New Years’ Day the football festival that it used to be - a wonderful tradition devalued as the big-daddy bowls convinced everyone that if they spread out a little more they could rake in more money.

And it can be done so easily. The BCS has already created the “plus 1" game; they simply are not using it for that purpose. They already play the “plus 1" game days after the Big-daddy have concluded, so there is not even a new scheduling issue. Too close to New Years for the teams and their fans? Then play it on January 15. And to address the argument that there are too many games, cut the regular season back to 11 games. We’ve already got a number of teams playing 14 games; this would actually cut back on the number of games for all but two teams.

It is time for college football to be dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 1990s. Later we can pull it into the 21st century.