Let’s be honest, the BCS is a joke. In competition, the only true way to determine who is the better team is to play the game. Think of the incredible upsets that have happened just in the past few years… Boise St. over Oklahoma, Appalachian State over Michigan, Texas A&M over… well, anyone :)
There needs to be a playoff system and I believe eventually there will be. This year is a prime example. I would bet we end up with four unbeaten teams and another four that have one loss. Putting these teams into a three-week playoff would determine the true national champion. But this year, like most recent years, we will end up wondering what could have been.
Does It Matter?
Austin Murphy, Dan Wetzel
Refresh our memory, BCS acolytes: Why must college football never have a playoff? Oh, yes, that's right. Because a postseason tournament would devalue the sport's singularly meaningful regular season.
But if regular-season wins and losses mean so much, how did Boise State drop two places in the AP poll after eviscerating Hawaii 42--7 last Saturday? How do the Broncos fall from No. 2 to No. 4 after outgaining the Rainbows 737 yards to 196?
So please spare Boise the platitudes about the sanctity of college football's regular season. And spare us Talking Point No. 2: "We believe the bowl system wouldn't survive a playoff," predicts BCS executive director Bill Hancock.
According to interviews with numerous bowl executives, television deal makers, athletic directors and conference commissioners, all the bowls—the major BCS ones, the mid-tier ones and the newbies you've never heard of—wouldsurvive, albeit in the shadow of the playoff.
But for a playoff to exist, it would mean that those now presiding over the bowl system—some (not all) of the BCS conference commissioners; some (not all) of the ADs and university presidents at whose pleasure Hancock serves—would have to release their grip on the sport's levers of power. And that, quite frankly, isn't going to happen, short of a successful antitrust action by the U.S. Department of Justice.
Until that glad day arrives—and it may be on the way—we are stuck with an inexact, capricious, widely despised system that is propped up and defended, in the main, by the people who profit from it. College football could have an opera, a Shakespearean drama, a season that builds to a stunning (and wildly remunerative) climax. Instead, it has a soap opera.