Hail to the “champions”

I used to hate the Bowl Championship Series (BCS), the admittedly lame method major college football uses to crown something that approximates a champion, but I have found something worse – casual fans of college football prescribing cures to what ails the sport.

They usually involve some vague, ill-defined scheme for a playoff “because every other sport has one.” They will invoke, as does Ashby Jones writing for the WSJ Law Blog, the inherent unfairness of the current system, which, in effect, prevents smaller, less well-known teams from winning the championship, or as Mr. Jones has it:

“People who follow sports for a living can make all the arguments in their sleep, but for me, it boils down to this: If you’re going to crown a national champion, isn’t it unfair, un-American, un-everything, to not give every team that wins every game a shot at the crown?!”

Well, no, actually, because the meritocracy that folks like Mr. Jones want to erect would be inherently unfair in its own way. A quick glance at the schedule of unbeaten Boise State University, Mr. Jones’ poster child for BCS inequality, reveals the sorry truth – the Broncos defeated one ranked team all year long (Pac 10 champion Oregon, 19-8, in Week 1). Thereafter, BSU feasted on a bevy of lightweights; beyond Oregon, not one team on BSU’s schedule had an RPI ranking above 40! By contrast, the Southeastern Conference (SEC) has only three teams (out of 12) outside the top 50. This is illustrative of how champions of major conferences must run a regular-season gauntlet of relatively strong opponents in order to secure a crown; Boise State beats one ranked team and then enjoys a buffet of cream-cakes on its way to a Top 5 ranking.

I don’t grudge the Broncos their high ranking, and I certainly believe that they would have a decent shot at defeating any team in the country, but I also think any middling major-conference team, say the SEC’s Georgia (7-5) or Pac 10’s Arizona (8-4), would have just as even a shot at defeating Boise State.

Enter Congress

The WSJ Law Blog seems an odd place for a BCS plaint, but the real topic for Mr. Jones is H.R. 390, a bill currently kicking around Capitol Hill that would, according to Mr. Jones, “prohibit the ‘promot[ion], market[ing], or advertis[ing]’ of a post-season Division I college football game as a national championship game unless it is the final game of a single-elimination post-season playoff tournament rather than the current BCS system.” Mr. Jones refers to the bill approvingly; I would beg to differ. Indeed, the degree of wackiness in H.R. 390 seems to be completely lost on its proponents.

At its heart, the bill attempts to prevent the BCS from marketing its #1 versus #2 season finale as the championship game. This is something I am amenable to, because I think the BCS “championship game” is really no such thing; however, it is clear that the proponents of H.R. 390 make this argument not so much to puncture the BCS’s pretensions, but to supplant it with a multi-team playoff system, a tournament. Implicitly, the bill’s logic is that only a tournament winner can properly be called a “champion,” but anyone with a little grasp of a history can easily see how slippery the label champion can be, even for tournament winners.

For instance, take college basketball. Once upon a time, during the infancy of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, the winner of the tournament was not so unambiguously considered the champion of all college basketball. For one, the NCAA Tournament competed with another post-season tournament, the National Invitation Tournament (NIT). For numerous reasons, the NIT champion was as highly regarded – and sometimes more so – as the NCAA Tournament champion. Over time, the NCAAs acquired cachet and became the dominant field, but this history lesson should demonstrate for us that the meaning attached to one tournament or another is assigned to it – it does not have any inherent meaning ipso facto. Tournament winners are national champions because that is what we have elected to call them in major college basketball, but it needn’t be that way and wasn’t always so. Tournament winners are merely the winners of tournaments, nothing more.

The Oppressive Onslaught of Mediocrity

This degree of contingency is not lost on the Associated Press (AP), which has issued final rankings of college football teams since 1934. Despite BCS arm-twisting, the AP has resisted automatically crowning the BCS champion as its #1 team. This led to a split championship in 2003, when AP voters rebelled against the BCS and voted Southern California as the top team, despite Louisiana State’s victory over Oklahoma in the BCS “championship game.”

While some congressmen apparently desire to field a college football tournament, we should be skeptical of the idea. For starters, football is a very different sport than basketball. Adding a few games to the end of a 30-game basketball season hardly makes a difference; adding four games to a 12-game football season is by contrast a significant change. An already grueling season becomes nothing but a war of attrition, and such wars are almost always often won by depth alone. This fact embodies what would be the unintended consequence of a football playoff; far from offering smaller programs an equal chance at glory, it would tilt the competitive balance toward the major-conference teams because those teams are the only ones that possess the roster depth to compete in a four-game playoff at the end of the season.

But there is another reason why a playoff would be pernicious to college football, damaging the very thing that makes the game unique in the sports marketplace – a meaningful regular season slate of games that generates enormous interest each and every week. This is so abundantly self-evident to the fan of college football, I hardly feel it necessary to articulate why, but there are those in the press who persist in arguing otherwise. I can only imagine that there is something about being a sports journalist that warps one’s sense of drama and competition. What is so hard to understand about the “survive and advance” aspect of the college football regular season? Naysayers will claim that it is not an immutable fact that losing a game during the season eliminates a team from championship contention (witness two-loss LSU’s 2007 championship); likewise, it is not a given that going undefeated earns for a team a place in the championship game (witness Cincinnati, TCU, and Boise State this year). The playoff proponents will say, because of these imperfections, college football should trade in its current model for a playoff structure.

But let’s think about this. We are being asked to trade in the week-to-week drama of the current set-up for something more akin to professional football. I’ve tried to watch professional football’s regular season; I find it difficult to sustain any interest in it. Take, for example, the “classic” Week 10 contest between Indianapolis (8-0) and New England (6-2), a game the Colts won 35-34 on the now-infamous 4th down call by Patriots’ coach Bill Belichick. It would have been a great moment, had not the entire world known that the outcome was pretty meaningless. Despite losing the game, the Patriots – now 9-5 on the season – are well on their way back to the playoffs. Exactly how does that game in Week 10 matter? But that’s the story every week in the NFL, NBA, NHL, and, to an extent, Major League Baseball. The hype outweighs the reality, which is a group of players going through the motions, where any sense of drama and competition is leeched out of the game and replaced with mere entertainment. That’s how you end up with a 9-7 team in the Super Bowl, like the 2008 Arizona Cardinals, or a 83-78 team in the World Series, like the 2006 St. Louis Cardinals. It’s a wonderful formula for rewarding mediocrity, one that I hope college football avoids.