BCS Myths

Unfortunately, the season did not end with as many undefeated teams as I had hoped. Only Alabama and Boise State ended with zero losses. However, of the teams that did not get a shot at the title (i.e. other than Florida and Texas), we had two that ended with one loss (TCU, Cincinnati) and five that ended with two losses (Central Michigan, Ohio State, Iowa, Penn State, BYU) . That’s seven teams that should have had a shot at the title. Why include teams with two losses? The 2007/2008 season clearly showed that you are eligible for the championship even with two losses as LSU who was ranked fifth going into the end of the season was vaulted up to the championship game.

Perhaps I should keep a tally of how many teams each year never get a legitimate shot at the title despite similar records to other teams in the same year.

Texas barely beat Nebraska for the Big XII championship on Saturday. So, by barely beating a barely Top 25 team, what does it mean? Does it mean that Texas might have already peaked and be on the down swing? Does it mean that perhaps their schedule was easier than we first thought? Does it mean that perhaps TCU, Cinncinnati or Boise State might be better contenders for the "national championship" game? Yep. Yep and Yep.

One of the core problems with the current system is that it does not account for teams changing over the course of the year. Some teams get better. Some teams get worse. The current system favors being in a major conference, being good at the outset of season and coasting the rest of the way. We will get one more chance to see if Texas is a pretender or not but what we won't get to see is whether the other four teams that will potentially end the season undefeated might have won the whole thing. Instead, we are left with one more year of this Mickey Mouse system wherein people throw darts at a board to determine the two best teams. So much for institutions of higher learning.

As is obvious to anyone that is not a university president or athletic director, the BCS is rigged. We all know it. It is geared towards getting money to a small number of conferences and schools at the cost of determining its champion in an equitable fashion. I did not think it was possible have more controversy than Utah's unbeaten 2008 season but this year will top that in spades.

Going into the bowl season, we are going to end up with five undefeated teams: Florida or Alabama, Texas, TCU, Cincinnati and Boise State. It is inescapable that the current system is arbitrary. Texas will get into the national championship game simply because it was sexier to pollsters at the outset of the season and never lost. Of course, a number of other teams have also not lost and therein lays the problem. Only a playoff can solve this problem. Only when teams actually playing each other can we know which team is the best.

Furthermore, this year finally put to rest any claims to Myth #4 "The regular season is just like a playoff." In a playoff, if you win every game, you win the title. However, we are going to potentially end the year with three to four teams (after the bowls) with unbeaten records. So much for that idea.

This weekend I watch part of the Texas-Oklahoma game...in the Cotton Bowl. Why? Are people still so childish that with big rivalries that cannot play on home fields? Seriously? By contrast, USC-Notre Dame was played in South Bend and in Los Angeles the year before. The game is much more exciting played on a team's home field. I suspect that part of the resistence to the idea of a playoff is where it would be played. The best way to keep teams striving for wins is to reward higher ranked teams with home field advantage in the playoffs. The only game that would be played on a neutral field is the championship game (primarily for revenue purposes). Imagine USC having to play Ohio State in the snow or LSU having to play Cinncinnati in the December. All of these college programs now have huge stadiums. We should take advantage of it.

Frank DeFord of Sports Illustrated has written a good article about the systemic unfairness of the BCS. It is amazing how the defenders of the BCS do not recognize it as the cartel that it is. One would think that any argument along the lines of "well, team [Fill-in a non-BCS school] couldn't play with the likes of [Fill-in a BCS school]" would be thoroughly trounced by now by the likes of Boise State, BYU and Utah. The ONLY fair and logical way to determine a champion is with play on the field.

In the category of debunking the "greatest regular season in sports" let's look at some of the gems in the first week of the 2009 season:

North Dakota State v Iowa State
South Carolina at North Carolina State
Troy at Bowling Green
Villanova at Temple
Coast Carolina at Kent State
North Texas at Ball State
Eastern Kentucky at Indiana
Utah State at Utah
Oregon at Boise State

Beyond Oregon-Boise State and perhaps Utah-Utah State does anyone care about any of these games? Remember, it's the "greatest" regular season in sports so obviously all of these teams have a shot right?

Wrong. Even if Iowa State were to go undefeated and win the Big 12, their chances of playing for the national title are zero. The same is true with all of these teams. We already know what happened to Utah after they went undefeated. Compare that to any sport where there is a playoff where EVERY team at the outset of the season has a shot at playing for the title. Knowing that your team has absolutely no chance of even playing for the title regardless of how many games is not fun.

As I listened to Eric Kuselias fill in for Colin Cowherd this morning, I heard Eric claim that Utah took the money of an automatic bid because "sometimes you have to choose between paying the rent and your principles". The problem I have with that sentiment is that it dooms us from ever actually fixing the problem. If the system is so corrupt that any noisemakers can have their silence bought then we will never get rid of the glaring inequitiy and insanity of the BCS. It is the reason that Congress had to break up Standard Oil because no one else had enough power to do it.

Furthermore, to say that Utah now "has a chance" at the title is a laughable. Just because they are going to get a BCS bid does not mean they are going to get a chance at the championship. All that means is that they'll get a higher paying bowl. They will still be snubbed for being in a weak conference. In short, they took Monty's offer and didn't get the goat but didn't get the car either and we the audience are stuck wearing the donkey outfits.

Another common argument I'm hearing about Utah is that they "should have been happy" with the bowl they got. They should be happy with a BCS bowl. This is akin to saying that Rosa Parks should have been happy to even be on the bus. She should have been happy to be "allowed" to walk to school or even go to school. What rubbish. Trying to gloss over manifest inequity with "you should be happy with what crumbs we gave you from the table" is conceitedness a outrance (thanks Mr. Buckley).

As I have said on many occassions, there are no reasonable arguments against a playoff. Every other college and professional sport does it, so can the FBS or whatever they call Division I these days.

As I listened to Eric Kuselias fill in for Colin Cowherd this morning, I heard Eric claim that Utah took the money of an automatic bid because "sometimes you have to choose between paying the rent and your principles". The problem I have with that sentiment is that it dooms us from ever actually fixing the problem. If the system is so corrupt that any noisemakers can have their silence bought then we will never get rid of the glaring inequitiy and insanity of the BCS. It is the reason that Congress had to break up Standard Oil because no one else had enough power to do it.

Furthermore, to say that Utah now "has a chance" at the title is a laughable. Just because they are going to get a BCS bid does not mean they are going to get a chance at the championship. All that means is that they'll get a higher paying bowl. They will still be snubbed for being in a weak conference. In short, they took Monty's offer and didn't get the goat but didn't get the car either and we the audience are stuck wearing the donkey outfits.

If we take the way back machine to the origins of the college bowl game, we find that it was a gimmick to draw people to Pasadena and generate more interest in the Rose Parade. It was akin to hat day at a baseball game. The only reason good teams were chosen is that an 11-0 Michigan team would draw better than an 0-11 team. The "reward" was really saying "you have played well enough to generate enough fan interest that we think you will fill seats at the game and make us money". In other words, even if you played the toughest season of any team in the nation and went undefeated, if there was no buzz about you, you were worse than a team with a couple of losses but more fan interest. To show you how little people cared about "a reward for a good season", because of Michigan's 49-0 drubbing of Stanford in 1902, the next year they switched to chariot racing replacing one gimmick for another. That lasted for more than a decade before they decided to return to the gimmick of football. During the 1930's, the "tradition" was to use exhibition games for things like charities.

The only "tradition" about the bowls is that they were always about making money and never related to rewarding teams. That is why changing the system is so difficult because while most intelligent people have moved past the desire to watch exhibition and onto the desire to watch real competition, the individual bowl sponsers will only do it if they personally will make more money. Even if a system is put in place that makes more on average for teams and game sponsers, if some of the old bowl sponsers personally will not make any more, they have enough power to kill the idea. Because the individual bowl sponsers and conferences have so much influence into any change, the only way change is going to happen is with an outside entity forcing the NCAA to put a real tournament into place. Thus, while the idea of Congress interferring with how colleges determine a football champion seems pedantic, it is likely the only way that we'll ever get rid of the bowls and the BCS.

The simple answer is drama. Dramas require storylines. Coverage of the NFL has done a great job of creating storylines that make games interesting for casual fans. College football has the advantage that the actors change every couple of years making the creation of new storylines even easier.

However, those storylines are empty without one key component: pressure. Without the pressure to reach the top riding on their actions, no one cares about the actors. If a mayor in a town of 1000 has an extra-marital affair with an intern, no one cares outside the town. If the President of the United States does, it is of huge interest across the country.

The college football product as it relates to expanding interest from casual fans suffers from lack of pressure making their storylines bland and uninteresting. None of the bowl games mean anything. So you win or lose the Rose/Cotton/Earl Schieb Paint the Toilet Bowl. So what? If there is no meaning in the outcome, there is no perceived pressure in victory and the drama falls flat.

What about the championship game itself? Given the above description, it should have all the elements necessary. It does but to a substantially lesser degree because no fan perceives the game as actually crowning a champion. If the audience does not believe the outcome to truly determine the champion, then perceived pressure no longer exists, the drama disappears and the casual fans lose interest. I'm sure the Florida and Oklahoma fans cared about the outcome, but how many people that were not fans of either school cared?

A playoff makes seven to fifteen games have meaning instead of just one and that pressure builds with each successive win. The "you came all this way" storyline emerges. In addition, it opens new potential storylines such as upsets. In the current format, it is simply not possible for a Cinderella team to "upset" the BCS because an army of voters must consider the Cinderella worthy of playing for the championship which by definition means they are no longer a Cinderella team. There are other storylines that are excluded by the current system such as the team that overcomes early adversity to win it all.

The list of storylines that might be possible in a playoff far outweighs those in the current system and that translates to greater interest from casual fans and that translates into more money.

I've mentioned on previous occassions that a playoff would make more money than the bowls. Jim Wheeler agrees as he proposed a playoff for $300 million to the NCAA back in 1999. Some have suggested that one of the elements pushing against a playoff is that the NCAA bylaws explicitly state that the season is over after the last bowl game and that changing it would require a vote by its members. However, this ignores other possible solutions including a two week playoff in December after the regular season and before the bowls.

An excellent article by Stewart Mandel at Sports Illustrated nicely illuminates additional holes in this myth. In short, the ratings for the BCS bowls are down with the exception of the Rose Bowl. It should be noted that the Rose Bowl is the core impediment to a playoff so unfortunately the fans are not doing a better job of dragging down those ratings. As many people I know echoed, 2005 will the high water mark for the BCS. That means that the ratings, overall, in the bowls will continue to decline until a playoff is put into place.

Beyond the mountain of evidence, do we need any more proof than the 2008 Utah Utes? They went 13-0 and smoked Alabama in the Sugar Bowl. Are they the National Champion? No. Why? Because the Beauty Contest System will not let non-BCS schools consistently take money from the BCS conferences. Just letting them play in a BCS bowl is the best bone they'll get thrown. Congratulations Utah! You have provided more evidence that the BCS is a farce.

Flaw: Better does not equate to good, reasonable or logical.

 "We used to have a hot poker jammed up our behind but now we don't heat the poker. It's much better." The BCS and whatever you wish to call the system before the BCS are systemically flawed for the same reason: both systems assume that humans can guess as to the two best teams without the top teams playing each other (sometimes despite the fact that the teams played each other as in 2008 when Oklahoma went over Texas even though Texas won when the two teams played each other). If humans were able to accurately determine which of two teams was superior, Vegas sports books would close overnight.

Flaw: Depends greatly on how one defines "right". Ignores teams with an early loss that may have improved near the end of the year.

What exactly is meant by "right"? If "right" means avoiding another public relations disaster, then they have only ever gotten it "right" once (2005). That year, it required having two teams put up about 50 points on every opponent they met.

The entire argument against the BCS is that there is no way to throw darts at a board and determine the two best teams. It cannot be done. The fundamental flaw in the BCS is that it assumes that sportscasters and coaches can guess as to the two best teams. 

 

 

As I watch the 2008 Gator Bowl between Georgia and Michigan State, it occurs to me that the bowls are somewhat pointless for warm weather schools. One of the original motivations for the bowls was to encourage tourism to the city in question. Does Florida really need additional tourism in the winter? How about southern California? Do Georgia fans really consider driving to Jacksonville to be much of a break from the "harsh" winters in Athens?

A big reason the Rose Bowl is successful is that it includes the Big 10 and four cold weather Pac-10 schools (Washington, Washington State, Oregon, Oregon State). If the Pac-10 and Big-10 were all located in warm cities, the Rose Bowl would not exist.