Cancel the BCS Championship Game
by SMQ on Nov 30, 2007 10:11 AM EST
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PrintFrom Slate, LSU fan Josh Levin's case for cancelling the national championship:
The BCS was created in 1998 to bring some semblance of order to the college postseason. Every year, we discover a new scenario the system can't deal with. But the BCS isn't what's wrong with college football. The problem is trying to overlay any kind of rational framework onto an irrational sport. College football's design makes it nearly impossible to compare teams: Since schools in different conferences have few common opponents, the regular season hardly ever settles which team is best. In college football, an undefeated season has always been difficult but attainable--a useful proxy for greatness if not direct evidence of a team's immortality. When two and only two major-conference teams (sorry, Hawaii) survive the season without a loss, a championship game provides the perfect ending. In every other situation, a one-off title game is guaranteed to be an unsatisfying conclusion. As the BCS has shown, for every year in which there are two and only two great teams, there are several more in which there are four great teams, or three, or one. And then there's this year, where there happen to be none.[...]
My modest proposal for college football is to have a little flexibility. In an ideal world--one without pesky things like TV contracts--the sport would play it by ear. If Texas vs. USC is the only game anyone wants to see, make it happen. If there are four one-loss teams, throw them all into a playoff. And if there are five or seven or 10 teams that are roughly indistinguishable, don't bother with a playoff or a championship game. The regular season may do a terrible job at selecting the country's best team, but it functions rather well at determining who the best team isn't. This year, every team has done more than enough to eliminate itself from contention. So, let's play all the bowls, give everyone a smallish trophy, and tell them better luck next year. I'm looking forward to a potential game between Missouri and West Virginia. Just don't try convincing me that the winner is anything close to great.
- - - Uh, yeah. Cancel it, or just don't call it a championship. Where have I heard that before?
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Well really
His most salient point is that College Football does not lend itself to an entirely satisfying solution in determining a national champion. It would be great if a flexible approach of the sort he suggest could be adopted but absent that we would be wrong to conclude that a playoff would be a panacea which would confer some sort of definitive patina of legitimacy on the winner as the real rather than mythical national champion.
I don't know...
A Missouri team that beats Kansas, Oklahoma and West Virginia would be worthy of hype in my books. Ditto for a WVU squad that beats a 1 loss Big 12 champ along with all the bowl teams they smoked in the reg season.
News spew about a lack of 'greatness' gets copied and pasted into existence any time the Name Brand Power Elite don't produce a couple of vaunted Juggernauts.
by MonL on Dec 1, 2007 4:02 PM EST reply actions
It's circumstantial
by SMQ on Dec 1, 2007 9:25 PM EST up reply actions
oh man.
I say lets put LSU in it. They always have fun games to watch.
by Fallen on Dec 2, 2007 12:22 AM EST reply actions
Only conference champs?
By this logic, the #4 rated team in the country right now in UGA would be locked out of a playoff berth while "lower" teams breezed on through.
This is one of the years that would lend itself to a "playoff creep" scenario where probably any one of the top 10-12 teams could go on a hot streak and win 2-3 games in a row. I am antiplayoff anyhow, but that particular argument doesn't seem consistent with many of the other stated goals of most playoff advocates.
CFB 2007 -- crappy or competitive? both?
But I can't agree with Levin, who thinks there are no great teams this season. Conferences were more balanced in terms of competitiveness, evidenced by weekly installments of Upset of the Century of the Week (appropriating an SMQ non sequitor). Why? Did the top teams stumble, or did several historically average teams have above-average seasons? Relative greatness is not the same as absolute greatness. It's tough to point to the two best teams (judged relative to the rest of the pack) this season, but that doesn't mean there weren't several great teams, judged by historic standards.
It seems like a minor point, but dismissing this season as an outlier, or a rare clusterf*** of less-than-great teams, implicitly justifies the BCS system. But if we expect to see more and more competitive balance in future seasons, a playoff system makes much more sense.
by EconoMz on Dec 3, 2007 6:24 PM EST reply actions
Crappy and mediocre
Or OU which didn't loose to, say, otherwise, undefeated Mizzou or a hypothetical 10 Texas but at 6-6 Colorado and at 7-5 Tech.
USC. LOST. AT. HOME. TO. STANFORD.
We could do this all day.
You could say that all this mediocraty was caused by injuries all around and you would be correct to a very significant extent. Crappy mediocraty, however, it has been.
"Relative greatness...
Well put. Sums it up nicely.
by crepuscular @ Sunday Morning Quarterback on Dec 4, 2007 7:30 AM EST reply actions
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