BCS officials fumble another chance
Posted: Wednesday, April 30, 2008 2:46 PM
Is Dick Cheney a member of the BCS?
That’s got to be the explanation for the latest load of nonsense to come out of the the outfit that runs the system by which college football does not choose a legitimate champion. Because these guys are blazing new ground in art of never getting off a bad idea.
They’ve just blown another chance to replace their idiotic opinion poll with a very modest four-team playoff. And they had the nerve to claim that not doing anything to make a wrong system right is in the best interests of the game.
“After a very thorough very good discussion among the group, we have decided that because we feel at this time the BCS is in an unprecedented state of health, we feel it’s never been healthier during its first decade,” Atlantic Coast Conference commissioner John Swofford told the Associated Press. “We have made a decision to move forward in the next cycle with the current format.”
He actually used the words “move forward” to define a decision that moves nowhere. This was after the commissioners of the BCS heard a proposal by SEC commissioner Mike Slive to hold three games involving four teams to determine a champion. The board decided it was a bad idea, because if you start having four teams play off for the title, the next thing you know, there will be eight teams and maybe even 16 and that would mean a legitimate champion, and college football simply can’t have that.
According to the AP story, the biggest roadblocks have been set up by the Big Ten and Pac-10, both of which can’t stand the thought of giving up their traditional New Year’s Day Rose Bowl game. They’re also worried about four teams expanding into a real playoff – they actually said that. And why would they be worried about access to the Rose Bowl? Couldn’t be money, could it?
A four-team playoff would have begun with the 2010 season, when a new BCS television contract is to be negotiated. So we’re pretty much stuck with an unfair system for the foreseeable future.
The decision is unconscionable. As I’ve written before, every college sport from fencing to diving to baseball to rowing has a national tournament of some sort. The NCAA basketball tournament is the highlight of the year and the best single-elimination tournament there is.
But football, the original and flagship franchise of college sports, still decides a champion by taking a poll of people who don’t see all the games, adding in the calculations of some computers, and anoints two teams to play for the game’s big crystal football.
And when they’re done with this charade, they have the chutzpah to call the winner the national champion.
They should be ashamed of themselves.
