While college football fans were riveted to the two playoff games on New Year’s Day (make that one-and-a-half playoff games, as the second half of the Rose Bowl was hardly must-see T.V.), some commentators could hardly wait to seize the moment to criticize the Bowl Championship Series (BCS), college football’s previous format for determining its national champion.  The point most often made by such commentators in the two games’ aftermath is that the BCS would have yielded a championship matchup that didn’t include Oregon or Ohio State, the two teams that have now earned their places in Monday’s championship game.  That is true, but it is hardly the self-evident demonstration of the superiority of the new system, the superiority of the new system’s selection process, or the inherent wisdom of adding more rounds of playoffs, that those who make this observation pretend it to be.

If it had been used to fill this year’s 4-team playoff, the BCS selection process would have yielded the same four teams — and it would have done so without needlessly jerking TCU around from its penultimate to its final rankings, as the 13-member committee that determined this year’s field did.  (TCU was #3 going into the season’s final week, beat Iowa State 55-3, and was rewarded by the committee by being dropped to #6.)  The BCS selection process, however, would likely have changed the pairings, with Florida State meeting Ohio State in the Sugar Bowl and Oregon playing Alabama in the Rose.  But if these four teams had each played as well in these hypothetical matchups as they did on New Year’s Day, then the BCS selection process would presumably have yielded the same championship matchup that the committee’s pairings have yielded.