Tonight, the 15th BCS National Championship Game will cap yet another extraordinary college football season. College football is the only major American sport that emphasizes the regular season over the postseason, like baseball did in its glory days (when the two league champions went directly to the World Series). Correspondingly, it’s the only sport that sufficiently rewards teams for season-long excellence, rather than for a brief flourish of postseason glory (on the heels of regular-season mediocrity), of the kind now routinely celebrated in Major League Baseball and the NFL.
College football’s postseason not only caps, rather than effectively supplants, its regular season, but it’s also unique. The Rose Bowl, the first bowl game, came about because the people of Pasadena, California decided that it would be good to celebrate New Year’s with a parade and (a few years later) a game. Now Pasadena is the center of the nation, and perhaps the world, on New Year’s Day. As such, the Rose Bowl and other bowl games are a reminder of America at its best: a nation of free citizens who come together, through their own choices and cooperation as private citizens (perhaps in connection with local governments), to form Tocquevillian civil associations that found, create, and build great things. Give me the bowl games over yet another generic playoff any day.
