There is no doubt in my mind that it’s the most wonderful time of the year, and it’s got nothing to do with the Xbox games I’ll be unwrapping in a couple of weeks.
The autumn confluence of baseball, football, basketball, and hockey is the sports equivalent of metaphysical poetry-- the end result is so epic that mental ecstasy is inevitable. Days like last Saturday are so full of sports that I have to preplan my sports-watching schedule in advance. Money can’t buy that type of happiness. But you know what doesn’t bring happiness? The single black spot on an otherwise blissful sports continuum- the BCS.
Time for a splash of cold water sports fans. JMU football just lost to North Dakota State. To put it bluntly, it sucks. There is no getting around that. But we had a nice campaign at the end of this year, and we even sent our seniors out with our first playoff berth since 2008. After the pang of defeat settles and we can actually look back on the year, there will be a neat since of accomplishment and finality. After an eight win season, we were eliminated by a solid, balanced football team.
Eliminated. It’s an ugly word for the loser, of course. It’s definitely not fun to be eliminated. However unpleasant it might be, everyone knows where a team stands when they’re eliminated. It’s a black and white mould, either you’re still in or you’re out. You know where that doesn’t exist? The BCS.
Rather than creating hard lines in the sand, the BCS system relies on the court of public opinion to create indistinguishable shades of grey. There are sometimes years like 2010 where no system is really necessary to determine who should play for the national championship. The millions of people who watched the BCS national championship last year all probably agreed Oregon and Auburn should be playing each other for the title. On the other hand, for every simple year, there’s a year of pure and utter unadulterated chaos. Take this year. There’s LSU, and then… who else? Even Houston is a one-loss team now. Alabama was lined up to go rematch the Tigers for the national championship, but what about Oklahoma State? What about Stanford? Boise State, even two-loss teams like Wisconsin and Oregon? How can anyone pick one opponent for LSU without making five or six teams feel like they got left out in the cold?
Maybe you’re that guy with all the answers though, and you think it falls together oh so neatly in ways we mere mortals don’t understand. Well I see your 2011 season, and raise you the entire 2007 season. Otherwise known to fans as “that really crazy year in college football,” the #1 and #2 teams in the country lost in the same weekend on three separate weekends. Two of those were the last two consecutive weeks of the regular season, culminating in a Saturday night game where Pittsburgh upset #2 WVU, knocked the Mountaineers out of the national title game, and knocked eventual champion LSU back into the title game. That season was such a mess, a playoff could have very easily resulted in any team winning. Think VCU all over again, you know, if VCU actually had a football team.
The other problem I have with the BCS format is, as mentioned before, it sometimes relies way too much on human polls. Over 65% of the BCS is determined by what voters in the Harris Poll and USA Today Poll think of teams. Virginia Tech was ranked as high as #3 in polls this year. After watching Clemson play them twice, is this the third best team in the country? But it’s not just the Virginia Tech’s of the world that cause ranking problems. Non-automatic qualifying teams like Houston and Boise State are clearly good teams on their own level, but how much of that talent transfers over when playing an SEC team? No one really has an answer for that. The only way to know for sure is to stick them in a bracket and let them have at it.
I’m not going to pretend a playoff has all the answers. Frankly, I like the fact that the current bowl system creates niches for teams that would probably never get a playoff bid. Just as there’s a Orange Bowl bid waiting for the ACC champion, there’s always a Belk Bowl bid for mid-level east coast teams. I’m not a big believer in the everyone-should-get-a-trophy, let’s-award-mediocrity cause, but at the same time, this format allows every team to compete for some sort of post season trip, not just the best of the best. And you know what? Don’t even get me started on the injury and academic risks to the pro prospects with an extended, multiple game playoff. This newspaper column can’t even begin to offer enough space for that conversation.
No system fixes all the problems or answers all the questions. But when everyone from Congress to the weird guy in the corner of your 8:00AM class has been screaming about how awful the BCS is for months, maybe it’s time we as a society accept the fact that BCS might not stand for the best case scenario. Maybe it’s time we change this thing.
***writer's note***
The above was written for the purposes of print journalism for Monday, December 5. Because of my deadline, I had to write the article and turn it in before the actual BCS bowl schedule was announced and thus could not include my personal reaction to the BCS selections. The selection of Michigan and Virginia Tech as at large teams confirms many of the things said about the BCS. Is the purpose of the college football postseason to reward the best teams, or to make money? The BCS often walks this line like a very drunk man at a sobriety checkpoint. Sometimes they even poll vault this line all together, like when a Sugar Bowl affiliate, when asked why Virginia Tech was chosen over other teams, chose to cite Virginia Tech's fan base as reasoning why they were selected. I give credit to the Virginia Tech fans for being very dedicated to their team- one of the very, very few things wvu and vt fans have in common, and something I can't say about the fans of archrival pitt- but when the first reason named is 1. directly related to the making of money and 2. completely unrelated to on the field play.. you have to wonder what's going on these guys' minds when they choose the teams to play in their bowl games.
Actually, scratch that. You don't have to wonder. They pretty much just spelled it out for us.
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