There is no reason a team that goes 12-0 and 9-0 in the S E fucking C should be left out of the national championship hunt. The Southeastern Conference is hands down the toughest conference in the nation. The Big 12 North sucks. The Pac 10 only has USC and Cal. Top to bottom, the SEC is better than either.
Don’t get me wrong. USC and OK deserve to play in the orange bowl. Both teams are stellar. But, damnit, so is Auburn. And the Tigers also deserve to play. Unfortunately, this ain’t Chinese checkers, so AU gets screwed.
Can’t disagree there. And it wouldn’t be hard, either. A little 8 team affair, to be comprised of the 8 conference champions that are highest in the rankings. This neatly solves any problems with unusually good mid-major teams and unusually weak major conferences (Big East, I’m looking at you!) in one fell swoop. Highly ranked second place teams from major conferences (this year would be Cal and Texas) will just have to suck it up. If you wanna be national champion, you gotta be conference champion first. First round goes the weekend before Christmas at the home fields of the top 4 seeds. Second round and consolation matches between first round losers go in the big 4 New Years bowls. Championship game goes one week later at a rotating site a la the Final Four.
Of course, this would make sense, so it will never happen.
Texas fan. Tell me about it. We don’t even get a BCS berth – granted we can’t beat Oklahoma and therefore we technically don’t deserve it. We had an Auburn fan at work last year (she has since moved) and man she must be pissed. Well, at least Texas doesn’t have to go the Holiday Bowl again this year, not that the Cotton Bowl is that much better. I can see the mundane sportscasters now: The battle of the UTs! Which school is the true orange and white? How fucking amazing will that be? :rolleyes:
The only silver lining to the BCS is that it serves as an object of shared hatred for all college football. Texas and OU fans: sing together at the flaws in the BCS! Ohio State and Michigan fans link arms and shout in protests! Auburn and Alabama, embrace and hurl objects!
Now wait just one cotton pickin’ minute! If you think I’m going to link arms with some @#$%ing Buckeye, even for the sake of BCS-hatin’, you’ve got another thing coming!
Well, maybe you can take heart in Cal’s none-too-dominating victory over Southern Mississippi tonight. Cal’s lead in the BCS race over Texas is so razor-thin that even a handful of changed votes would put Texas in the lead. And voters are not unknown to punish teams for winning games by margins that are judged to be not overpowering enough. Southern Mississippi was a 24-point underdog, but Cal won by only 10, pulling away in the final minutes with the help of an unusual special-teams play.
Hell, I’d settle for a four team playoff, with the entrants decide by the polls. An eight team playoff would mean three games after the conference championships. Cap the regular season at 11, play the conference championships, and rotate the BCS bowl between the semifinals and the finals… of course that leaves one left out.
But let the one left out get the pick of the litter of what’s left. The bowls aren’t going away, and I actually see no reason to get rid of the second tier bowls (Capital One, Peach, et al.).
I wouldn’t mind a larger playoff, but the college season can’t be extended too long.
On preview:
How is this the fault of the BCS? When there are three unbeatens, #3 gets screwed, with or without computers. I don’t think the playoff system is a good idea anyway. First of all, it will never happen because nobody involved actually wants it to happen. Second of all, it doesn’t solve anything. Teams that don’t deserve to be in the hunt will be some years, and teams that deserve it won’t be other years. How do you decide which one-loss team gets the fourth spot? What if the fourth seed wins the championship? What if there are five unbeatens, or none?
More importantly to me as a fan, though, it would take away the drama of September, October, and November. Who the fuck is going to care about the Red River Shootout when the loser is still going to be in the national picture either way? The way it works now, the whole damn season is the NCAA tournament. I’d rather have elimination games to watch every week of the season than wait for a mini-tournament featuring the same-old same-old every year. This particular year, and last year, it worked out so somebody was left out in the cold, but I think that’s just an inevitable consequence of having 119 or however many teams gunning for a common championship over a short season. No system is going to satisfy everybody unless you can play 20-30 games per team.
Well, that’s another thing. Ask USC fans how the system’s working out right now. Go read how they felt about it last year. It just changes too much year-to-year to be able to fix it with a complicated system. Taking out strength of schedule is a perfect example – they keep trying to change it to fix last year’s problems, and you’re never going to fix it in everyone’s eyes.
Plenty of people want it. Pretty much all college football fans want it. Probably even USC fans after last year’s debacle. There are plenty of people against it.
Of course it solves something. At least the teams will meet on a field of play. In an 8 team playoff, which can be done by adding only one week to the season (probably sometime in mid-December when teams are idle anyway – i.e. next week), all of these teams would meet on a field of play. There would only be one undefeated team left at the end. That’s all anyone is asking for. A playoff system isn’t perfect but it is a whole helluva lot better than coaches with agendas and computers with secret formulas determining who plays whom.
8 team playoff is the way to go. You can do this with 8 bowls (including a loser’s bracket). Keep the old bowls in place for the UNT and Bowling Green fans. The four premier BCS bowls (Orange, Fiesta, Rose, Sugar) will be the 2 semi-finals and the championship/loser final games. The other four bowls can either rotate from the larger bowl pool or can be elevated up (take the Cotton, Gator, Peach, and another one perhaps Capitol One or something – the New Year’s Day bowls). First round bowls get played next week. Semi-final round bowls get played New Year’s Day. Finals get played a week later, which ends the season exactly 3 days after it is scheduled to end. If you are complaining that the season is too long, eliminate the conference championship games. Use the BCS system to rank the top 8 teams. The only sacrifices to be made are around team 8/9. This is far less of a tragedy than a “championship” system like the BCS that includes #19 Pitt and #14 Michigan but leaves out the #6 team in the nation.
Nobody argues that the computer conglomerated rankings are perfect. They work to an extent, but it is a travesty that they are used to exclude a team which has played perfectly from competing for a championship. Yes, there are always going to be Boise States (who probably should be in the mix also) who play a weak schedule and run the table. But schools in weak conferences know that if they want to compete at a national level, they need to improve their non-conference schedules, so we can come closer to comparing apples to apples. That’s where a computer helps. Get to a reasonably fair level, and then let them sort it out on the field.
But it’s also more than that. The SEC is going to be pissed off. The fact that the conference champion is being passed over is not going to go over well with the AD’s within the conference. It looks bad for Georgia, Tennesee, Florida, Alabama, everybody.
And those guys have pull.
When USC got passed over last year, everybody felt bad. But they got a share of the championship, and well, nothing against USC or Cal, but the Pac Ten isn’t the SEC. Passing over Auburn very well might kill the BCS.
One more thing. As a die-hard Texas fan, California should go to the Rose Bowl. They’ve been waiting for decades for this. A Michigan/California Rose Bowl is the way it should be, and I would feel dirty to see Texas put into the BCS over California.
Monkey, I believe you’re overestimating the importance of the SEC in the grand scheme of things. Yeah, it’s a good conference, but it’s not, as some of its fans apparently think, the undisputed champion of conferences. In any given year, any of the major conferences can be home of the best collection of teams. Well, okay, in years past the ACC and Big East were maybe a small step down. Not much, though, and now the ACC is right up there, though the Big East is no longer any more significant than the WAC. If Auburn getting passed over has any larger impact on the BCS than the travesties in years past, it will only be because a few of the key players in forming the BCS were from the SEC. But I don’t think it will have any impact at all, sadly, with the new BCS television contract having been signed through 2010.
I didn’t say nobody wanted a championship playoff, I said nobody who has a say wants it – that is, the presidents of the schools, and the bowl people. Lengthening the season is a big problem, and adding bowls makes for crappier teams in the bowls on the bottom. That, plus the fact that they’ll no longer be able to choose the matchups they want, means less money for those bowls. Eliminating conference championships is also not an option.
Eventually, for financial reasons, there probably will be some form of a playoff, and maybe it’ll turn out to be like the NCAA basketball tournament – a huge cash cow and a big event. I hope everyone realizes, though, that football isn’t basketball, that nobody cares about regular season college basketball, and that the best team in the country rarely even makes it through to the basketball final.
I’ll be the first to admit that we may overestimate our conference down here. BUT, since there is no doubt that the SEC is a major conference, and it’s getting screwed, AD’s across the nation will stop and think, “what if that happens to us?”.
The BCS was origianlly supposed to expire after 2005, and after this fiasco I can’t see any major conference supporting it. Nobody’s happy with it. Just like a coach that hasn’t performed, it will be thrown to the curb like the inept whore that it is. My prediction is a four team playoff. I’d support that.
The BCS contract will be renegotiated.
Damn I hope I’m right. This ain’t fair and I’m pissed. Ironically enough, that last word works for the British usage, too
Fuck, when will the fucking BCS “committee” get it through their thick fucking skulls that the majority (vast majority) of NCAA football fans want a playoff system? For fuck’s sake! The NCAA allowed a 65[sup]th[/sup] team to compete in a “play-in” game against number 64 for the Basketball tourny! Not only do they include 64 teams to compete for the championship, they allow an outsider to knock off a tourny team to even enter!
Do what I do folks. (And I admit I wouldn’t if Wisconsin had actually played well the last two games.) Boycott. I’m not even trying for a joke response here.
Boycott these motherfuckers and let them know you’re not watching. Call the local affiliate, write/call/e-mail ESPN, write a letter to your local paper’s editorial page, do what you can.
Remember, the NCAA title game is analogous to the NFL deciding whom plays in the Super Bowl based on not only the record, but more important the teams they played and a computer algorithm.
