Florida is not champion -- NCAA says so
Posted: Friday, January 09, 2009 1:37 PM
If you haven’t read John Tamanaha’s column on the pusillanimous AP pollees who wouldn’t do the right thing and vote Utah No. 1, read it now. It’s required reading for all the knuckleheads who still think computers and polls are the right way to determine the champion of college football’s flagship sport.
John’s right. Utah has every bit as much right to be called the champion as does Florida. The only thing he didn’t say is that the reason Utah isn’t considered good enough is because the voters have grown up believing that the Mountain West Conference is inferior and because these votes go along regional lines. There are more newspapers and more writers and more voters in the East. Given that fact, it was inevitable that they’d go with Florida.
But Florida is not the national champion. On its own Web site, the NCAA does not identify a national Division 1A champion, because there isn’t one. Champions are listed for Divisions I, II and III, because those divisions have playoffs, just like every one of the other 17 men’s sports and 19 women’s sports that the NCAA governs.
Florida is the BCS champion. It’s a fine title, and Florida is a great team and a worthy holder of BCS title. But that doesn’t make the Gators the national champion. If you don’t have a playoff, you can’t have a champion. It’s that simple.
And college football has never had a legitimate champion determined on the field.
That’s just wrong, and I’ve been saying as much for at least 15 years. When I started, just about everybody thought I was an idiot. Now, the President-elect of the United States agrees with me along with probably the majority of college football fans.
Fans seem to agree. In the poll we’re running on our site, readers say that Utah is the real champion, choosing the Utes by a 47-33 margin over Florida, with USC third and Texas last.
ESPN is also running a poll on who the national champion really is. As of this afternoon, Florida was the winner with 43 percent of the vote. Utah was second with 32 percent. The votes are regionally distributed, with the East and Southeast going for Florida, the Midwest for Utah, Texas for Texas, and the West Coast for USC.
Well, there’s a surprise right up there with discovering that a Denny’s Grand Slam breakfast hasn’t been endorsed by the American Heart Association. Florida is in the region with the greatest population and it wins the overall poll, just as it did in the AP poll.
But even the fans with all their biases couldn’t give Florida a majority. If this were a real election, there would be a run-off between Florida and Utah to find the real winner. And if it were a real championship, USC and somebody else – Do I hear Boise State? – would be part of a genuine playoff.
But college presidents won’t approve it. They don’t have a legitimate reason not to have a playoff. They just keep saying no.
And ESPN, by the way, is no help. I just got done listening to one of their “experts,” Mark May, say unequivocally that Utah would lose to Florida if there were a playoff. He said there was no question about it, and was, in fact just as sure of that pronouncement as 90 percent of the experts were last February that the Patriots would beat the Giants.
May also said that college football should not have a playoff because he likes all the arguments the current system spawns.
I know a lot of people who think like that, and I want to scream every time I hear the argument. As some of my friends will tell you, sometimes I do scream.
Who cares why you want it? Put yourself in the position of a player and tell me what you want. If you play for Utah, do you want things to stay the same? What about USC or Texas?
This is a sport, and sports are decided by athletes on the field, not by voters on their couches. What’s best – and fairest – for the players is what should be of paramount importance, not what’s best for arguments in bars.
Don’t tell me it’s better this way, because it’s not. The only reason you say that is because it’s the system you grew up with, and therefore it must be right. You wouldn’t agree that we should vote to determine who gets to be the champion of Major League Baseball, the NFL, the NBA or even college fencing. That would be silly and wrong, you would say. The reason you would say it is because we’ve always had playoffs to determine those champions. It’s what you grew up with; it’s tradition.
Tradition has its place in life. We speak a given language because it is traditional that people in our country speak that language. If we gave up that tradition, we couldn’t communicate, so that’s a good thing. We dress a certain way because of tradition also. While there’s nothing inherently better about wearing jeans as opposed to kilts, there’s no harm in most clothing customs, either.
But just because we’ve always done something a certain way doesn’t mean we should keep doing it that way. Slavery was an ancient human tradition sanctioned by the Bible. Spousal and child abuse were traditions, also. We got over them, just as we got over the “tradition” of social classes and hereditary monarchies and state-sponsored religions and killing babies with physical deformities.
I’m not equating the BCS with slavery and other true evils. But the argument holds. If college football had had a playoff from the get-go and someone suggested a BCS to replace it, you’d think that person was loopier than Richard Simmons on an acid trip.
So congratulations, Florida. You won the only game they let you play, and you did it in impressive fashion. Just forgive me if I don’t call you national champions, because you’re not. Nobody is. Nobody ever has been.
