BCS doesn't need tweaking
— it needs to be scraped
When will officials learn that a playoff
is the way to determine a champion?
Chris O'meara / APLSU coach Nick Saban holds up BCS trophy after LSU defeated Oklahoma in the Sugar Bowl. If officials were smart, they would scrap the BCS and go to a playoff system to determine the national champion.
COMMENTARY
By Mike Celizic
NBCSports.com contributor
You can’t fix something that doesn’t work, no matter how hard you try. Some day, the NCAA and BCS will understand that.
It probably won’t be soon. The guardians of college football’s highly coveted, yet utterly illegitimate, national championship are instead bent on “tweaking” the current system, following the shared title last season between LSU and USC.
For years, we’d been giving computers more control over the season-ending battle between the two alleged top teams in the country. Now, the guardians of all that is absurd in competitive sports are ready to boldly go ahead to the past by giving more weight to the opinions of human beings in picking the two winners of the annual championship lottery. This, of course, is the system that worked so well it had to be “tweaked” by the addition of computers.
The only way to choose a champion of anything is on the field. This isn’t a secret, not even to the NCAA. Every sport the NCAA governs determines a champion in a tournament of some kind. Division II and III college football have national championship tournaments. So do baseball, lacrosse, fencing, swimming, wrestling, and all the rest.
Only Division I football, the biggest, richest and most popular of all college sports, doesn’t have a legitimate champion. And the guardians of the game keep telling us this a good thing. Why? Because they’ve always done it that way.
If that were a legitimate reason to do anything, we’d still have slavery, women wouldn’t be allowed to vote or hold a decent job, 10-year-olds could work 12 hours a day in sweatshops, and nobody would pay any income taxes. (Okay, so some traditions were better than others.)
The arguments against holding a championship tournament are endless — and specious. College presidents are in the van in blocking it. They talk about the length of the season and keeping kids in class and a whole lot of nonsense.
The reality is that football takes kids out of class less than any other sport. College baseball teams play scores of games and no one notices. Basketball lasts from October to April — nearly seven months — compared to football which starts with practice in August and ends at the beginning of January — five months. Basketball games take players out of school during the week. There are two or three games a week, each one a two-day trip away from campus.
Football games are played on Saturday. Teams travel at most six or seven times a year, not 15 or 20. They don’t miss class during the week unless the school sells out for a mid-week game on ESPN.
A tournament for football could involve as few as eight teams. Put them in the big four bowl games and call it the quarterfinals. Two more rounds give you a champion. That’s at least one more game for just four teams and two more for two teams. It’s hardly a burden on all of college football.
Or, have a 16-team tournament, using Christmas week bowl games as the tournament sites.
It’s hardly difficult to do. And at the end your highest profile sport crowns a legitimate champion.
I don’t understand why anyone would object to this, unless it’s because it makes too much sense.
Instead of sense, we get the annual announcement that the BCS folks have thrown another eye of newt and tongue of bat into their cauldron and pronounced the brew a success. And even as they do it, we all know that within a year or two we’ll have another disputed championship and another dash to the cauldron for more mumbo-jumbo.
Think of the football championship as a grand ocean liner with a hole in the keel big enough to drive a star running back’s “loaner” SUV through, as well as a few pinholes at the waterline. The college football folks are busily patching the pinholes while all great Neptune’s ocean pours into the hold.
You keep wondering where Micheal Ray Richardson is at times like this, because we need somebody to impress upon these bozos that the ship be sinkin’.
© 2012 NBC Sports.com Reprints ![]()
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