You can make the case that in every sport there are a few
things that need to be updated or revamped. The NBA needs to do something about
TV timeouts so that the last 4 minutes of a close game don’t last over half an
hour in real life. The entire soccer world needs to slowly start phasing in
modern technology such as live replays and coaches challenges because it isn’t the
1800s anymore and there’s really no need to be blowing calls due to human error
(or when Serbia ’s
playing, paid refs). The NFL should probably consider firing commissioner Roger
Goodell before he turns the league into some weird non-contact, flag football
organization. However, no matter what your opinion is on other matters,
everyone can agree that NCAA football needs a complete overhaul. The current
Bowl Championship Series is probably the biggest atrocity in all of sports and
needs to be changed immediately.
Pretty much, the current system works by having like 58,000
bowl games each season that mean absolutely nothing. Rankings are made up of 3
equal parts: a Coaches Poll, an AP Poll (where some “experts” decide who they
think the best teams are), and a computer program that apparently calculates
things like a schools difficulty of schedule and how impressive their wins are…sounds
legit. Each bowl makes HUGE profits and all of the bowls except the BCS bowl
really don’t matter. The 2 schools selected for the championship game (BCS
bowl) are determined by the super flawed rankings and the winner is crowned the
champion of college football. I don’t really want to talk anymore about the
dynamics of the current BCS system or the “reasoning” behind the college
football leaders supporting it. Instead, I would like to provide my opinion on
how the system can be improved (although, realistically, even flipping a coin
at the beginning of the season to determine who the college champion is would
be an improvement on the BCS system currently in place).
The change that I propose is the same one almost every
college football fan has been begging for, but with some logical twists. The NCAA
needs to adopt an 8 team playoff at the end of the season. There are
approximately 120 Division 1 schools in college football and most of them are
garbage. However, every year there are about 10 teams that go either
undefeated, lose 1 game, or lose 2 games against really good opponents. These
teams can all potentially make a run for the championship, but all teams
outside these 1 or 2 loss teams really don’t have a shot. In pro sports there
are 12 team playoffs in a league of 32 teams because the competition is so
close, any number of teams can make a huge late season push and win the title.
For multiple reasons (such as school prestige, ability to recruit better
prospects, etc) this is not the case in college football.
Now we have to map out the logistics. The one thing I would
propose that might be really strange to some people is to keep the BCS computer
ranking. It sucks when 3 teams are tied for first and it comes down to a
computer simulation to decide which teams will compete for the championship,
but choosing the top 8 teams is reasonable (because anyone outside the top 8
realistically has no claim to being the best team in the nation). I agree it isn’t
a perfect system, but the alternative is for a bunch of biased old white dudes
to decide who they think are the best teams in America and choose the top 8 based
on that. Sure it’s flawed that an equation determines how many points you have
to beat a team by to deserve high praise, but it’s better than having biased
personal opinions choose which teams have been the best all season. That being
said, the top 8 in the ranking won’t necessarily be the teams that advanced to
the playoffs. Some conferences have a playoff system in place which determines
the winner of that conference each year. The biggest flaw to this is that the
conference must be comprised of at least 12 teams to be eligible to face off in
a championship game. The computer ranking always favours teams with more games
played so schools from bigger conferences are always the ones to play in the
BCS championship. Still, I would leave this rule and ensure each team that wins
their conference a spot in the playoffs. One spot in the playoff would also be
reserved for a team in the non-major conferences (i.e. C-USA, MAC, etc). It’s
stupid that Boise
State Conference
School
For the seeding, the bracket would use the BCS ranking that
are currently in play. The conference winners (of the ACC, Big 12, Pac 12, SEC)
would grab the top 4 spots and be seeded in the order that they appear in the
BCS rankings. The remaining 4 seeds would also be determined by the BCS ranking
with the exception that if a non-major school isn’t in the top 8, they grab the
8th seed in the bracket (otherwise, they get whichever seed matches
their ranking), Might sound kind of complicated but its actually fairly simple
and makes sure that all teams, regardless of conference size, have a chance to
earn a spot in the playoffs. Some might argue that this is still unfair and
that teams will be left out. I can agree that it isn’t a perfect system, but
like I keep saying, the teams that would be left out of the top 8 are teams
that would not have a serious shot at winning either way. Why not expand the
bracket to 12 or 16 or more? The answer is two-fold: 1) Football isn’t like
other sports. Your body takes a huge beating and games can’t be played more
than once a week. Asking young athletes to play even more games would lead to more
injuries and be potentially costly later in life. 2) These are still students.
Extending the season by an additional week or two weeks would be an even
greater burden on their academics and could potentially leak into their exam
period. This would put schools in a very tough place, having to choose between
either athletics or their academic reputation.
Now that most of the playoff is set up, the last thing I
would propose would be a game changer that would almost certainly never happen.
The current BCS system makes too much money with neutral-site, sponsored bowl
games to ever consider it, but the best thing would be for the seeding to
determine home field advantage. The higher seeded team gets to play the game at
home for each of the first 2 rounds, until the finals (which even I agree
should be played at a neutral site). In some sports like basketball and hockey
this isn’t such a big deal but in football, which is played outdoors, this
would definitely be a HUGE difference maker. For example, a Big 10 team that
gets home field advantage (i.e. Michigan , Ohio State
Like I said earlier, pretty much any change to the current
system would be a positive one, but I personally believe that this would be the
fairest way of determining the best team in the NCAA. If I had to put some
percentages on the chances of seeing changes in the next 5 years, I would say:
Chance of seeing a playoff= 50%
Chance of seeing an 8+ team playoff= 20%
Chance of incorporating home field advantage= 5%
Chance of getting rid of the BCS computer ranking= <1%
Chance of getting rid of all of the meaningless bowl games
even if they do incorporate a playoff= 0%
I’m not super confident that I’ll ever get to see my dream
NCAA playoff scenario, but at this point, any change is good change.
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