Plea from a College Football Fan

It's November again, or as it's known in college football circles, Start-Complaining-About-The-BCS-Month (this is why they don't release any BCS standings until October, because if people had reason to complain about them all season, then the shear mass of all the complaints would cause the earth to collapse in on itself like a dying star). Even though Pete Carroll and Joe Paterno apparently beat me to the punch this year, I have some complaints of my own.

The playoff system never gets instituted because the people that trash talk the subjectiveness of choosing two teams to play for the championship usually have a vested interest in one of the teams that wasn't chosen. Those people can be easily dismissed as poor losers. If their team was so good than they wouldn't have lost to Team X and that's why Teams 1 and 2 are playing for the championship and not their crappy team. My problems with the BCS have nothing to do with being a poor loser, though, because none of my teams are ever anywhere close to contention.

So here's my anti-BCS thesis: The current, opinion-based post-season game scheduling leads to boring bowl games and provides an incentive for successful programs to schedule weak, sickly, and overmatched opponents, which leads to boring non-conference games. As a fan I want to see exciting football games and I think the BCS cheats people out of lots of exciting games (and don't bother to tell me, “BUT MIKE WHAT ABOUT THE 2006 FIESTA BOWL!1~!!!!” Ok, what about Florida over Ohio State 41-14 in the championship game, LSU crushing Notre Dame also 41-14 in the Sugar Bowl, or USC dominating Michigan in the Rose Bowl 32-18. The score of that last game makes it sound closer than it was since Michigan had two fourth quarter touchdowns that made the score more respectable. Those were the other bowl games involving top 5 teams in 2006. YAWN.)

Making bowl selections completely into a popularity contest provides a HUGE incentive to win as many games as possible, regardless of the opponent. The most concrete selling point possible for your team is a good win-loss record: everything else relies entirely on intangibles and style points which will be vigorously debated. You can't debate a win-loss record, though, and that automatically makes it the least subjective and therefore most important factor in determining quality of a team. Sheer volume of victories often trumps quality victories alongside losses to quality teams.

Under the BCS, this necessity for a bulletproof win loss record to contend for a shot at the title provides an incentive to schedule weak non-conference opponents. There’s nothing to gain from playing tough out of conference teams and everything to lose: either your team wins like they should have because they’re so great or they lose and are mediocre—undeserving of a berth in the championship game. In this situation it is almost impossible to come out ahead unless the victory is thoroughly dominating, and even that isn’t always a guarantee of respect (see Ohio State at USC this year).

All of this leads to the Boise State theory of BCS respect: play enough high schools and WAC teams that you finish undefeated. Yeah, I know, they beat Oregon this year, and don’t misinterpret what I’m saying, it was a quality victory for Boise State, but be careful not to infer too much from it. The Ducks have been struggling and were down to their fifth string quarterback by the end of that game. I’ll be honest here, I didn’t even know the depth chart at quarterback went as far as five: that’s what I learned from this year’s Boise State-Oregon game. So while a victory over a PAC-10 team is always good for a team like Boise State, a victory over a struggling team playing their 5th string quarterback doesn’t exactly make me feel compelled to drive down to Boise and fellate everyone involved in their program. (I say that Oregon is struggling because as I write this, even though they are 6-3 on the season, the victories have all come over teams with losing records and the losses have all been against teams with winning records.)

This reminds me of the parable of the cautious team and the aggressive team: one year an Oregon State team started by playing at Stanford, at Penn State, at home against visiting USC, and then on the road again at Utah (yeah, they crushed Hawaii somewhere in there, but try to follow along anyway). Three of those teams are currently ranked in the top ten. Oregon State won a single one of those games and were dismissed as mediocre or even awful (if you’re talking to an SEC fan). Let’s have a little though experiment now: let’s say that instead of playing Stanford, Penn State, and Utah, they played Portland State, Eastern Washington, and New Mexico State. Well as I write this they would be 8-0 with a signature victory at home against then No. 1 USC and would undoubtedly be ranked in the top ten. Does that sound like any other team you can think of? Texas Tech started by playing Eastern Washington, Nevada, Southern Methodist, and Massachusetts. As I write this before their game with Oklahoma State, they are 9-0 featuring a signature win at home over then No. 1 Texas. Notice that I am not saying Oregon State belongs in the top ten, nor am I saying that Tech belongs out of the top ten. I am merely pointing out the incredible incentive to schedule weak teams early in the season. Had Oregon State been less ambitious in their scheduling they would be ranked and respected, but instead their perceived awfulness is going to keep USC out of the championship game.

So anyway, if teams from the major conferences schedule nonworthy opponents instead of going head to head with the big boys from the other major conferences, accurate rankings are even harder to produce. By the end of the season everybody has a pretty good idea of which the best teams are within each conference because there’s so much information to work with on conference games, but comparing the different conferences is hard. If we have a strong team from the PAC-10, BIG-10, BIG 12 and SEC, then which two should play each other for the championship? There’s not enough information to make that call! If all those conferences played each other often then it would be easier, but if they schedule junior high schools and division II opponents, there just isn’t enough information. Hmm, let's see, the SEC champ beat Middle Southeastern Tennessee Tech by 34 points and the BIG 12 champion beat East Jesus A&M by 40 points. What insight can be gleaned from that? NONE. That says nothing about either program. No new information is provided by those victories, except the fact that Middle Southeastern Tennessee Tech and East Jesus A&M were paid a shitload of money to let themselves get taken to the woodshed (Note to the slow, those are not real schools).

With accurate rankings difficult to produce, the post-season matchups can often be boring and, in a bad year, they can be like the end of the 2007 season. Those bowl games weren’t boring compared to exciting football games, they were boring compared to other boring games. Out of six bowl games involving top ten teams last year, only one was competitive. That’s right, five of six bowl games with top ten teams resulted in blowouts. Now I think it would be reasonable to assume that, out of the seven games required with an eight team tournament, less than six of those games would be blowouts. Wouldn’t that be nice? Competitive football? Exciting games? I know I’d be watching.