Back to the future

After Saturday’s college football games concluded, there was a familiar unease in the air. Once again, after the regular season’s final gun had sounded, the Bowl Championship Series (square peg) failed in its mission to pit the clear-cut #1 and #2 teams (round hole) in a winner-take-all bowl game. Instead, there is a clear #1 in the Ohio State Buckeyes, and then a gaggle of one-loss teams who all feel deserving of the spot opposite OSU in the BCS Championship Game.

Just as this scenario seems to play out every year, one can also expect the legion of playoff advocates to hit the airwaves, complaining about how every sport at every level has a playoff, except college football…woe is man.

I don’t care for the current system any more than most folks, but I must admit, I’m not a big fan of the playoff concept either. The NCAA just added a twelfth game this year, and when you add a conference championship game plus three more games (in an eight-team playoff), that brings the total to 16 games in a season for the champion and runner-up—that’s too many games.

In many ways the system we have in place today was a reaction to the 1994 season. That year, there were two teams clearly better positioned than any other for a national championship: both Nebraska and Penn State were undefeated, and most pundits agreed that no other team was even close to the Huskers and Nittany Lions. But because of the ancient traditions of the Rose Bowl, pitting the Big 10 and Pac 10 conference champions against one another, Penn State was locked into playing 9-3 Oregon in the Rose Bowl. This was an Oregon team that, despite winning the Pac 10 title, had managed to lose to Hawaii (3-8-1 in 1994) by three touchdowns, not an ideal bowl opponent for a potential national champion. This left Nebraska free and clear to play 10-1 Miami in the Orange Bowl, ultimately propelling the Huskers to a national championship. The blow was particularly hard for Penn State. Under Joe Paterno, the Lions have fielded five undefeated, untied teams (1994-1986-1973-1969-1968), yet only one of those finished the season ranked #1 (1986).

Although the Pac 10 and Big 10 conferences loved the Rose Bowl, the member schools finally realized that such an automatic tie-in was counter-productive; they finally relented, gave up the automatic Rose Bowl berth, and joined the system we now have in place that seeks to match #1 versus #2.

Only thing is that, while solving the problem brought about by seasons like 1994, the BCS has created a new problem. We have discovered, much to our chagrin, that seasons like 1994 are few and far between. Last year happened to be one of those. Clearly, Texas and Southern California were the undisputed #1 and #2 at the end of the season. But if you look at the recent history of college football, this scenario just doesn’t happen very often. More likely, you’ll have a clear #1 and then a host of teams bunched together that can make a claim on #2, or you’ll have a situation like 2004, when three teams went undefeated, each with a legitimate claim to #1. In short, we’ve created a system every bit as capricious as the one we sought to replace, a system that works out for the better about as often as a solar eclipse, a system that naturally makes the playoff argument—like Santa Claus, Christmas trees, and unbearably crowded Manhattan sidewalks—an icon of December.

The only thing I would like to see, by way of improvement, is that the BCS bowls change the way they currently pick their post-season match-ups. The current system automatically fills in #1 versus #2 in one bowl and then allows the other BCS bowls to pick teams in a round robin fashion. Instead, I’d like to see us abandon the automatic #1 vs. #2 and the round robin selection system for a system where all the BCS teams are up for grabs. Each bowl, rotating from year to year, gets to pick two teams at a time. Therefore, if there is a clear #1 and #2, a BCS bowl has the option of pitting them against one another. If not, the bowls can pick whomever they choose.

Even this method is potentially fraught with trouble. For example, let’s imagine that a final AP poll looks like this: (1) California (12-0); (2) Rutgers (12-0); (3) Notre Dame (11-1). Further, let’s imagine that the Fiesta Bowl gets the first pick. There would be a considerably strong financial incentive for the Fiesta to choose one-loss Notre Dame over undefeated Rutgers, a move that would short-circuit the entire point of giving the bowls more say-so in deciding their own match-ups. Of course, one could supplement the system with all kinds of Byzantine rules, i.e., if there are only two undefeated teams, then they must play each other, etc., but I’d take this system—even without the extra stipulations—over the one we currently have.

In any event, the current BCS system, by attempting to account for every possible outcome, is becoming not unlike a legal code that attempts to legislate against all possible offenses. It’s unwieldy, untidy, nearly incomprehensible, and ultimately unfair.

As a little thought exercise, imagine if we were to turn back the clocks on the 2006 season. Imagine if the system in place in, say, 1980, were still in place today. The bowl match-ups would be:

Rose
Southern California (10-2) vs. Ohio State (12-0)

Sugar
Florida (12-1) vs. Michigan (11-1)

Orange
Oklahoma (11-2) vs. Wake Forest (11-2)

Fiesta
Notre Dame (10-2) vs. Louisville (11-1)

Not a bad little post-season. The great thing here is that Ohio State would still have to defeat a very good team to claim #1. And even if it lost to USC, one-loss OSU could still claim #1, but by winning, two-loss USC would not likely receive any #1 votes. The more likely event would be that the winner of the Florida-Michigan game would then have a claim on #1, particularly if Florida won, because Michigan, of course, already lost to Ohio State during the regular season.

Messy, you say? How is this scenario messier than the current system? Instead of sorting this mess out after the bowls (like it used to be), now we attempt to sort it out beforehand by shoehorning two teams into a “championship game,” even when there are more (or less) than two teams deserving.