Why the BCS should go

Yeah, this is one of my rare non-geek related posts. Those that know me know that I'm an avid football fan, following college football and attending 2-3 games a year at different universities I live by. Year after year we as fans have to put up with this mockery of a system called the Bowl Championship Series (BCS). I'm really sick of it, as are most all college football fans, players, and coaches. The system needs to be changed. Now.

A bit of history... (disclaimer: probably not factually 100% correct, but close enough)
Bowl games started out a long time ago, back when college football didn't have any post season, let alone any collegiate sport. Committees of rich folks got together and thought they could make a bunch of money if they could get some big name schools to agree to play each other after their seasons were over. Over the years, some bowls started agreeing to affiliate themselves with certain conferences. One of the first bowls to be affiliated with certain conferences was the Rose Bowl, which did so to help desegregation more than anything else. The Southeastern conference at the time didn't allow black players to play on their teams, so the Rose Bowl affiliated itself with the Big 9 and PCC conferences (precursors to the Big Ten and Pac-10). As transportation got cheaper for teams and more and more rich folks organized their own bowl games, people started realizing that the whole system was a mess. Some of the really rich schools got together and decided that because they were rich, that they could engineer who would be the national champions. They really didn't like the idea of a small school winning enough media votes to take the national title from the big schools, like BYU did in 1984. They figured if they could come up with a system that guaranteed two of their schools always played for the national title, no smaller school could ever win it. That's how the BCS was formed.

Over the years, enough fan uproar has prompted small patch fixes to their system, but for the most part, it's still intact. No smaller school will ever win the title under the current system. The changes that have been made have been essentially bribes. If the bigger schools share some money with the smaller schools, maybe they'll be quiet and let the big schools keep winning the championships. When it first started out, the smaller schools could compete with the bigger schools (see BYU 1984). Over time though, the engineered system of the BCS has made the BCS conferences stronger to the point that more than likely, a smaller school couldn't win a title now. The advantage BCS schools have, when it comes to recruiting, boils down to one fact only - if you play for a BCS school, you have the opportunity to win a national title, otherwise you don't - that's it. As athletes in high school decide where they want to play college football, they ask themselves if they want to win a title or not. If the answer is yes, then they should go to a BCS school because anywhere else that's just a fantasy.

The root of the problem with college football's system is that the system isn't fair. A flawless system would guarantee that no matter what school a team is from, that if that team is the best team in the country, that that team will win the national title. If somehow North Texas can put together the best team in the nation next year, there's absolutely no way anyone in the country will know it. Because they're from a smaller conference (Sun Belt), their wins won't give them enough credibility with poll voters. Because college football schedules are made years in advance, there's no way a team has control over who they play. It's not like the coach can look at his team one year and think he's got the greatest team ever and then somehow readjust his schedule to increase his schedule strength. Conference membership in the smaller conferences guarantees a majority of their games will be played against inferior opponents. Thus, conference games can't be a reliable indicator of how a good a team is either. The only way a non-BCS school will ever break the system and win a national title is to somehow come up with a dynasty where they have the best team year after year after year. Only after winning so consistently will they ever be able to schedule stronger opponents. Even then though, it may not be enough. They'll have to be good enough for long enough that they get invited to join a BCS conference. But then you're back to square one - no non-BCS school will ever win a national title.

The only way a system can be truly fair is to throw out the bowl system entirely and replace it with a playoff. If bowl sponsors want to sponsor different playoff games, that's great, but get rid of the invitation-bowl system, after all, don't the sponsors only really care about advertising dollars? The politics of college football seem dirtier than any politics in Washington DC. Even though a vast majority of fans, players, coaches, and students all want a playoff system, back door deals done by rich folks are keeping us stuck with the flaw that is the BCS.

To fix the system, a set of qualifications for postseason play needs to be in place that applies to all teams, no matter their conference affiliation. To require a team to go undefeated to play for a title is a little out of the question. The logical next step is to use polls, but the amount of bias and flaws inherent in that type of system negate any advantage it could bring. The next logical qualification to use conference championships. Each conference can set it's own criteria for determining who is their conference champion, but at the end of the season, each conference has a guaranteed representative in the postseason. As there are 11 conferences and because 11 teams does not an even playoff make, add in 5 at-large bids. My suggestion would be for these bids to be decided by committee, without using any type of poll or ranking. This committee could/should be made up of people previously involved in college football but now have no conflict of interest in making these bid decisions. I would suggest former coaches or players who are no longer playing or coaching football in any respect, nor involved in the media.

Since many people want to make this whole system change about money more than anything else (even though we're talking about an amateur sport), I have a few suggestions on how to run this playoff. With sixteen teams, it will take four rounds to play this through. I would play the first round of playoffs at the higher seeded team's home school. This gives them a significant home field advantage. After the first round, I would re-seed the playoffs and then let those rich folks who ran the previous bowl system bid to host these playoff games. The more money they bid to give to the participating schools, the better chance they have of hosting it. The highest bid gets the championship game, the next two highest bids get the semi-finals, and so on. In time I think this type of system will result in more revenue for the actual universities, which is the whole point, right?

One of the big arguments for the current BCS system is that it makes every regular season game a playoff game and any postseason playoff system would cheapen the regular season. Another is that a postseason playoff would mean these athletes would miss too much school and make their season too long.
On the first argument, each regular season game is not a playoff game. If it were, when you lost you would be done with no chance at playing for a title. While it may hold true in some years, this football season is a perfect example of where it doesn't. We have two one-loss teams playing for a national title when below them in the rankings is two undefeated teams. While a postseason playoff would make it so that a team could still win its conference championship with a few losses, it will enable those big schools to hoard the revenue from non-conference games amongst themselves. Since they apparently only really care about preserving their cash flow, wouldn't not having to schedule teams like Utah State, North Texas, Citadel and Appalachian State and instead playing other teams from the other BCS conferences generate more money? Sure, they may lose a few of those, but their postseason hopes aren't thrown out the window either.
The second argument is easily debunked by comparing lost school time of football players to that of other NCAA sports. Football players miss less class time than almost any other sport. Basketball players have games twice a week or more and their seasons last from November through March, spanning two school semesters.

The general consensus though is that the BCS system is systematically flawed and needs replaced. The sad truth of the matter is that what we're likely to get is more backroom politics applying patchwork bribes to the system in order to preserve their stranglehold on college football for as long as possible. The only way any changes will ever come to fruition is if fans learn to speak to them in a language they can understand--with money. If fans stopped buying things with team logos on them, if fans stopped going to games and just watched it at home or not at all, or if fans stopped donating money to these schools, they might someday get the message that the current system needs to be thrown out the window entirely.