B.C.S. Advocates Are Full of Shit
Scratch and sniff the ramblings of any supporter of the current college football postseason format and you’ll learn that the numero uno reason that the B.C.S. – or some other non-playoff scenario – remains the best option is that it preserves the sanctity of the regular season. “College football already has a playoff system! It’s called the regular season! Add a playoff at the end, and you’ll make the regular season meaningless.”
That’s why B.C.S. advocates are full of shit.
The notion that the regular season would somehow become devoid of relevance and excitement and that it already represents an in loco playoff system in and of itself is so patently and craptastically absurd that I want to slam my hand in a fucking car door.
But, as the old saying goes, never judge a man until you’ve walked a mile in his shoes. Not only can you better appreciate his position, but you’re also a mile away from him and you’ve still got the sorry bastard’s shoes. So let’s try it on for shits and giggles…
This contention, in essence, is that your average fall Saturday won’t have the same do-or-die drama that it currently does, and the games will somehow mean less if more than two teams complete the season with a chance to play for the championship. As Exhibit A for their argument, they present the NFL, in which a team like the Arizona Cardinals can play barely-.500 football over 16 games and still come within seconds of taking home the Lombardi Trophy at the end of it all. Or similarly, we also had a mighty 8-8 San Diego Chargers squad sneak in the postseason’s back door and end up all the way in the Conference Championship last season. Detractors rightly raise the point that for eight weeks out of the regular season, the Chargers performance on the field – and those of the opponents who beat them – meant virtually nothing.
The problem with this idea is that the professional and college football have about as much in common as apples and lawn chairs.
The NFL has 32 teams – 12 of which earn the opportunity to play in the postseason in a single-elimination shot at the Super Bowl. In other words, over a full third of the league (38%!) reaches the postseason in their respective conference.
However, the college game has 119 teams at the Division 1-A level, meaning that even if a proposed 16-team playoff (my favorite idea) went into effect, roughly 13% of the nation would have a shot at the title. Drop that to 8 teams, and you’re talking about less than 7%. Do morons really believe that if you have to perform better than 93% of the country over the course of 12 games, the weekly intensity and significance would somehow disappear? This is really the argument?
One more thing: I’m going to flip this argument on its head and show that a playoff system would actually increase the aggregate relevance and excitement of college football’s regular season. By a longshot.
Even if you hold to the inherently false belief that the regular season is so exciting because it represents its own elimination-style playoff on a weekly basis (which is a load of chimp excrement – explain how 2-loss L.S.U. wasn’t “eliminated” in 2007, or how Oklahoma and Florida State previously played for titles over teams with the same record who defeated them), it’s quite simply Bizarro Math. The reality is that by adding a playoff, you’d have far more games that actually mean something throughout the entirety of the season.
In the final week of the year, we had exactly two relevant games: Oklahoma and Missouri, in which the Sooners heroically ran up the score to earn more computer points than Texas to hold on to their #2 spot (how fucking stupid does that sound?), and Florida against Alabama. U.S.C. – 11-1 and arguably the nation’s strongest team – engaged in a meaningless contest against UCLA. Boston College and Virginia Tech played a conference championship game that garnered lower ratings than the average episode of Herman’s Head.
Were Division 1-A..er, I mean the FBS..not the only level of football from pee-wee to pro scared of a playoff system, the season’s final week would’ve brought us four do-or-die, shot-at-the-title games instead of two. And instead of holding relevance for four programs (Florida, ‘Bama, Oklahoma, Texas), a whopping ten fanbases (by adding in the still-in-the-would-be-mix U.S.C., Oregon State, Missouri, Virginia Tech, B.C., Texas Tech) would have found themselves glued to the tube, as their team’s chances to play for a title all hinged on the results of that weekend (under the obvious assumption that conference champs would earn playoff bids).
For more empirical evidence, back up just one week earlier and see that five games had any relevance whatsoever to the National Championship picture: Texas vs. A & M (‘horns needed to win and have the Sooners lose), Florida vs. F.S.U. (low-rent, butt-cut-wearing, lying scumbag Urban Meyer needed to avoid a loss to remain #1), Bama vs. Auburn, U.S.C. vs. Notre Dame (Trojans needing to win and get a little help from Oklahoma or Florida or Bama), and Oklahoma vs. Oklahoma State. All were do-or-die games for at least one of the participants, with five teams still reasonably vying for a chance to play for it all.
Here again, were it not for the existence of the collusive, monopolizing, Nazi-esque B.C.S., 11 games that week would have held eliminator-style relevance to the championship picture, as additionally West Virginia/Pitt, Cincy/Syracuse, Virginia Tech/Virginia, Missouri/Kansas, Texas Tech/Baylor, Oregon/Oregon State all featured teams (in bold) whose shot at a title likewise would have depended on the result of their game.
And we’re panicky over the fact that we’d have at least twice as many games each week that help determine the championship? We really don’t think more games that matter each week = a more exciting and interesting regular season? How much more fun would it be to have more than double the number of teams in do-or-die games each week than we currently see? And how much more thrilling would 3-4 weeks of a real postseason be versus the shit sandwich known as “bowl season?”
Keep this in mind next time you hear that Machiavellian dictator Jim Delaney (who, like other B.C.S. advocates, is full of shit) tell you that in the current system of college football, “every game matters.” No, they don’t. But they could.