THE BOWL CHAMPIONSHIP Series formula often seems as absurd as medieval alchemy: A combination of two human polls and six computer algorithms spit out the college football rankings, from which are determined the teams that will play in the top bowl games and which two teams face off in the mini-playoff that is the BCS national title game. Why not avoid this mess and have the players duke it out on the field in a full-fledged playoff, as they do in the NFL and even Division I-AA college football? But, as Ralph Waldo Emerson observed in a rare fit of practical wisdom, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” and while the BCS is not perfect, a college football playoff, far from a panacea, would pose problems of its own while destroying the distinctive character of Division I college football.
First, a playoff would not necessarily guarantee a “true national champion.” Sure, a playoff is a decent enough system, in our fallible world, of determining which team seems to be the best, but it is not foolproof: A scientist tasked with determining which college football team is the best would not be content with a mere single-elimination playoff–he would have to run the experiment multiple times. At the very least, to find the “true national champion,” you would need to have two teams play each other in best of three series–an absurd, time-prohibitive idea for football. If a playoff is imposed upon college football, the end result will not necessarily be the “absolute national champion,” who dominated the competition all season. On the contrary, it will be whoever survived the playoff–playoff survivor, rather than national champion.
As a friend of mine recently noted, the NCAA’s basketball tournament is aptly called “March Madness”: it involves a good dose of insanity, because it is so severed from the regular season, which hardly predicts what will happen in the tournament. If college football had a playoff, some of the madness would be eliminated by reducing the size of the field to the top 16 or 8 teams. But how do you pick those teams? Well, with the polls–human, computer, or a combination thereof, so we still have not eliminated the problems of the BCS itself.
A playoff could also interfere with the academic mission of football-playing universities–at least a smattering of which still try to educate their student-athletes. However absurd this may sound, the players (and the student fans) are still, ostensibly at least, students who will be taking exams in December, and thus college game day would unduly intrude into exam time. Ironically, a subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce committee held a hearing in December of 2005, during which chairman Joe Barton and others used their position to nag the conference and bowl presidents for a college football playoff. Barton felt that this concern fell under his jurisdiction because “college football is not just an exhilarating sport, but a billion-dollar business that Congress cannot ignore.” Little mention was made of education, because all would have to acknowledge that, due to the great hubbub of college football games, and the subsequent strain they place upon a university, a playoff would entirely sever the connection between the intellectual mission of universities and their athletic pursuits.
A playoff would do violence to the unique character of the regular season. Presently, to be national champion, a team truly has to be dominant all season long–quite a feat and something to be praised. The fact that even an early season loss can prevent a team from wining the national title imbues a great importance to each game, a situation that makes each fall Saturday (and now, alas, some Thursdays) into great moments for colleges, during which alumni return and students and parents gather to cheer on their team in games that matter. The regular season is college football’s playoff–every game is critical to the ultimate result of the season, and there are rarely second chances. This “no-mulligan” approach makes for exciting sport, while imparting valuable lessons, such as the notion of the importance of the consequences of our actions in every moment–something that many pro athletes would do well to remember.
With the bowl system, teams can end a season with a good win while failing to win the national title. The current system allows teams to shoot for practical goals: other, tangible victories can be achieved short of a national championship (I say this as a Notre Dame fan who simply would like the Irish to achieve their first bowl victory in over a decade). This helps prevent hyper-competitiveness, which, while attractive for pundits and armchair quarterbacks, should not be the end, the purpose, of college football. With ever greater focus on being the “true national champion,” sportsmanship and the academic enterprise fall by the wayside. Vince Lombardi was famous for saying “winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” Later, he regretted this turn of phrase and stressed that he meant what was truly important is “making the effort to win.” That doesn’t quite catch the ear the way his initial formulation did, but it’s worth pondering.
Admittedly, the BCS is not infallible, either. The astute bloggers over at BlueGraySky.blogspot.com have been investigating possible biases in the Coaches and Harris polls, the two human arms of the BCS. They discovered, for example, that seven out of 11 conferences, through their representatives in the Coaches poll, gave most, if not all, of their BCS votes to Florida for the number two spot so that the Gators would play Ohio State in the national title game. On the other hand, the Big Ten gave four of its five votes to Michigan. Moreover, Big East coaches ranked their own conference members an average of 2.3 spots higher than everyone else ranked them, and so on. Such a system will always be subject to bias, but, as with our complex federal government, it is expected that the powers (sundry computer polls, two human polls) will check each other, and out of the chaos will emerge a fair result. Plus, the formula can always be tweaked: the idiotic, always-wrong New York Times computer poll is no longer part of the BCS formula, for example.
Besides, the BCS gives statistics lovers something to embrace, and conspiracy theorists something to fret about–all the while preserving two important college traditions: the Bowl games and the regular season. Embrace diversity: Resist the temptation for a “foolish consistency,” and let college football have its own system.
Joseph Lindsley is an editorial assistant at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
