I think the BCS sucks, but it still beats having journalists and coaches vote to determine who the champion is. That method sucked a lot worse.
Regarding a playoff, I would prefer expansion to either 4 or 8 teams. I loathe the “there will always be a team with a gripe” argument, as the legitimacy of the gripe gets worse and worse the more teams you include. I think 16 would be too many based on logistics, number of games played, and the fact that teams 9-16 are almost certainly 2 loss teams (or worse!). Teams 9-16 in the BCS standings as of this moment either 2 loss teams, a small conference 1-loss team (BSU) or a 3-loss team (Alabama). These teams just have more specious claims to national championship aspirations than teams 1-8.
Keeping the championship small also has the effect of making conference championship games important; in a 16 team playoff it wouldn’t matter much if you won or lost, aside from seeding. Winning a conference championship in an 8-team playoff scenario could make the difference between making it or not.
The only thing keeping me from suggesting an auto-bid to the winners of conferences are the ACC and Big East. Way to screw it up, guys.
Any system that declares a champion based on voting, be it human or computer-based, is inherently flawed. In a 16-team tournament, hell, even an 8-team tournament, you might miss teams on the fringes but you’ll still have the top-5 covered, and then you can be sure that it is earned rather than awarded.
Exactly. What’s even more ridiculous is that the pre-season ranking carries forward. So teams like Alabama and Florida get ranked in the Top 5 and have the advantage over other 1 loss teams should they just lose once. After Alabama lost this year, many of the so-called experts felt that Alabama still had the inside track to the BCS championship game.
The Boise State haters always point to the weak schedule, as if Auburn or Oregon would be guaranteed to go undefeated with Boise State’s schedule. But good teams lose to worse teams all the time. The joke is that the national champion, even when undefeated, needs all sorts of luck to win anyway. Oregon needed a choked short field goal from Cal. Alabama needed a blocked extra point last year during its undefeated season. Auburn escaped at least one loss due to the other team missing an easy field goal.
Oregon ended that game with the ball on the Cal 15 yard line, having completed an 18 play, 9 minute 25 second drive. If they had any sort of urgency they would have scored on that possession, and probably a touchdown at that.
6 BCS Conference Champions + Any Undefeated Non-AQ School (If any) + fill out with top BCS teams. Seed according to BCS standings (1v8 etc.). First game at higher seed. Second game at Orange and Rose Bowl.
Connecticut@Auburn
Virgina Tech@Oregon
Oklahoma@TCU
Wisconsin@Stanford
Pending the outcomes of this weekend’s games.
“ZOMG!!! UConn but not Ohio State?!?!?!” WIN YOUR CONFERENCE! (Big East is AQ, like it or not). Get screwed, it’s your conference’s own fault. If you were eligible to play for the championship under the current system, you’re guaranteed under this system. Get screwed under this system, you didn’t even have a chance under under the current system anyway.
Yes, teams would fill the home stadiums for the first round. Yes, fans would travel twice for a National Championship game.
I can’t imagine how anybody could make an argument that someone not selected by this format deserved to be National Champion.
Most likely true, but we don’t know how they would have responded when being down that late, and we have no idea how much the missed field goal deflated the Cal defense (despite the fake injury strategy). And they were also lucky that the Stanford game was at home this year. The home/away schedule is another part of the luck factor.
Don’t get me wrong, I think that Oregon and Auburn are the best 2 teams in the country this year, although Stanford and Wisconsin are close. The problem is that I don’t know how good TCU really is. And even though Boise State lost, they could very well be just as good.
I really hope that Auburn wins against SC, because that will be one exciting BCS championship game. I think the over/under might be in the high 70’s.
Wisconson, Ohio State and Michigan State tied for the Big 10 Championship. The only tie-breaker that Wisconson wins is the BCS standings. Take that away and you do not have a clear Big 10 Champ without a Big 10 Championship game adding one more game for them to play. All three have just as much claim as the others to that spot.
In fairness, the BCS system does represent an honest attempt to determine the true champion, and do it on the field where it should be. Every change the NCAA has made, clunky and inadequate though each has been, actually has gotten us closer to that, and in the face of strong opposition from the major bowls at that.
I agree that the obvious next step (if it isn’t eliminating polls and stats algorithms from the equation) is the Plus One approach. The current system isn’t all that far away as it is - the championship game is later than the New Year’s bowls and handled and promoted separately anyway.
Actually, it stops just fine. The point of a college football playoff wouldn’t be to recognize the teams which are all deserving of a spot in the playoffs. That’s what we have BCS bowls for.
The point is to find the best team in the country, and for that you really only have to worry about the top three to five teams. Maybe ten at most.
Easily rectified by just defining more tie-breakers. The NFL has 12 steps to break ties within a division… ending with just giving up and tossing a coin.
And, of course, we’re not talking about doing away with BCS rankings, just not using them to pick two teams for a national championship game. No reason they couldn’t still be used as a tie-breaker or to make bowl selections.
All I can say is, nothing makes me cheer harder for Boise, etc. than when Big Football schools complain that Boise plays an easy schedule. Aside from the SEC, is there a single Big Football team that schedules more than three or four potentially tough games a year? Teams that do schedule tough games are punished, because all idiot voters and commentators care about is how many losses a team has, not what good teams they’ve beaten.
If I could change the system, I’d make it so that games against non-competitive opponents just don’t count. Schedule them if you want, but they don’t help. And losses don’t subtract anything, only wins count. So you could have, say (all numbers made up, but trying to be typical) Ohio State with a record of 3-0, which isn’t as good as Auburn’s 5-1.
I carefully watched Boise several times this year. They are a well coached solid team. They tackle well and don’t suffer with the ego of a superstar. But I suspect their team is of lesser quality than a few big time teams with programs that lure the star athletes. I hope they draw a good team in the bowl games.
What it comes down to for me, is that there is no way to have a fair system as long as viable teams are scattered all over in countless conferences that rarely play each other.
So I am happy to see the “Boises” of the world left out, if only because that tends to lead to them abandoning their conference and playing more games against the “major” conferences. The only way anything approaching fairness will happen is consolidation.
Thus we have Utah, BYU, and TCU all leaving their conference to presumably play more “major” schools. That’s progress. If they weren’t getting left out, we may not have had that progress. It doesn’t really matter if they are going to have “better” schedules, what matters is more overlap with other viable schools.
