New system needed for college football
ALL IN: By Adam Colmone
IV Leader Columnist, Dec. 9, 2004
College football needs a playoff system
In late August the College Football season started with every team having a chance to play for the National Championship, but now it’s down to three schools.
USC, Oklahoma, and Auburn are all undefeated, but one of those three will not make the trip to the Miami to play in the Orange Bowl for the national title game on Jan. 4. If the season ended today, the Orange Bowl currently would have the No. 1-ranked USC Trojans versus the No. 2-ranked Oklahoma Sooners, with the Tigers of Auburn being the odd team out.
The reason for this is the Bowl Championship Series. The BCS has four bowl games, those being the Orange, Sugar, Fiesta, and the “granddaddy of them all”, the Rose Bowl. The BCS takes the top teams from the six major conferences — Big East, ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, PAC 10, SEC — and Notre Dame to decide who will play in the four BCS bowls.
The BCS, which began in 1998, has proven to be an unreliable system and all it has done is cause controversy every year. The system was created to eliminate the second guessing of who should play for the national championship year in and year out, but what it’s done is create animosity among fans, coaches and pollsters.
Most college football fans want to see the two best teams battling it out for who is the best in the country, but the chances of seeing that this year do not look good. There are currently five undefeated teams in college football, the three stated above and also Utah and Boise State. Utah and Boise State come from two weaker conferences and would most likely never get a chance at the title game.
The BCS has been tweaking its system every year since its inception to try to make it better so that the two best teams will square off, but every year it fails. The system just seems to try and fix the previous year’s problems and is not proactive in anticipating upcoming problems. This year the big surprise is that Big East conference champion Pittsburgh, a team that is 7-3 and the 17th ranked team in the nation, will play in a BCS game because they are the winners of the Big East, one of the “major” conferences with an automatic BCS bid awarded to its champion.
Problem is, the Big East is very weak this year. They most likely will face the aforementioned Utah in the Fiesta Bowl on Jan. 1.The reason Utah is going to play in a BCS game is because the rules state if you finish in the top six of the BCS standings you are guaranteed to play a BCS game.
This is the only hope for teams from the smaller conferences. This is supposed to be a game for an up-and-coming program in Utah to try to show they can play with the big dogs of college football, but instead they get stuck playing an unproven team that went to overtime with a Division II school.
In 2005 the NCAA and the BCS contract is up and hopefully the NCAA will not renew the contract. The best thing to do is have a four- or eight-team playoff system and let the best teams in college football battle it out to see who truly deserves the label of national champion.
For example, this season you could put number 1 USC vs. 8 Boise St, 2 Oklahoma vs. 7 Utah, 3 Auburn vs. 6 Texas, and 4 California vs. 5 Louisville. This would create a great buzz around college football and who knows, maybe it would end the same way as the projected BCS title game of USC vs. Oklahoma, but at least if it happened in a playoff system we would know that those teams belonged there.