College Football Playoffs, Schmayoffs…Let a Thousand Bowls Bloom!

So, today, the BCS is out.  J.D.’s post below explains it about as well as anything.  As J.D. points out, the BCS is designed to establish an annual College Football Champion, a team that, when all is said in done, is unequivocally, by unanimous agreement, the best team in College Football that year.

In the past – before there was a BCS – when the season ended and when all the bowls were finished, the AP and UPI polls rated all the teams.  Several times these polls ended up listing two different teams as number one after all was over.  And this drove the “purists” nuts.  So, the BCS was created, and one of the rules of the BCS was the title game would pit number one against number two, and the winner of that game would receive the vote for the number one, “just-gosh-darn-bestest-team” in all the land.

Ah, but the purists are not satisfied.  They want a playoff system, a la NCAA basketball.  Nothing short of that will serve to create a true, pure, number one champion, in their minds.

In my mind, I think that is all a bunch of yak.

I like the current system, with the Citrus Bowl, the Outback Bowl, the Bluebonnet Bowl, the Independence Bowl, the Weed-Whacker Bowl, the Some-Guy-Selling-Used-Tires Bowl, whatever.  I don’t need a “definitive champion”, someone’s version of “closure”, to justify the sport or the season for me.

If College Football institutes a playoffs system, you can kiss all the “minor”, pre-January bowls goodbye.  A playoff system would turn these bowls first into a football version of the NIT, and, in short time, render them economically unviable.  When would these minor bowls play?  They would have to play on weekdays, as the playoffs would crowd out all weekend football watching.  And that would kill them.

Moreover, there is something else about a playoff system in College Football I don’t like.  Playoffs, national championships, World Series, etc., all avert attention away from what I find so beautiful about sports, which is the process, the journey, the season, the struggle.  Definitive one-games outcomes, championships, etc., tend to dilute that.  The best part about college basketball is the NCAA tournament itself – I agree.  But the best part of that tournament is the first two rounds, not the title game, not who “wins”.  Championship games take something timeless and turn it into something temporary.  There will always be another “champion” next year, and the year after that…

I guess you gotta have champions.  They come and go.  But the game itself is eternal.  And that’s why I love sports.

Image courtesy Getty

A Cubs and Northwestern fan, Joe Moag is a major sports junkie, and although he still runs, he hasn't been able to dunk anything more than a donut for decades.