How To Fix The BCS (By Completely Getting Rid Of It.)

This is another article I wrote that was published in The Stall.......

The first college football game was played on Nov. 6, 1869. Since then, Division I college football has grown into one of the fabrics of this country. However, Division I college football does have one big glaring problem that has been a thorn it the side of not only the sport but its fans as well,the way that a national champion is crowned.

Before 1998, there were numerous co-champions crowned due to certain teams being tied up in various bowls games and the different polls (The AP and ESPN-USA Today) each having a different team ranked number one. The clamor was deafening for a new system that would guarantee a true national championship. So in 1998, former SEC commissioner Roy Kramer created a new system called the BCS, or the Bowl Championship Series.

To determine a national champion, the BCS uses a myriad of formulas to determine the best teams in college football so the top two can play for the BCS National Championship. The problem with this system is that it places far too much emphasis on the different computer rankings and by giving automatic bids to certain conferences, it doesn’t provide a level playing field for undefeated teams from smaller conferences to get a shot for playing for the national title. Teams like TCU and Boise State (who perennially gets shafted by the BCS), who come from these smaller “mid-major” conferences that don’t necessary have the perennial powerhouses that other conferences like the Big Ten and the SEC have, therefore they have to face each other.

Much like the clamor that brought on the BCS, there’s now clamor for a new way to determine a national champion that doesn’t depend on computer formulas. The vast majority of these detractors point out the one thing that every other college sport has to determine the champion, a tournament. I’m one of these people so I’ve come up with an idea for a 32-team tournament that will give the mid-majors a truly fair shot at the national title.

There are 25 conferences in both Division I-A (aka The Bowl Sub-Division) and Division I-AA (aka The Championship Sub-Division). They are also teams in each of the two sub-divisions that don’t belong to a particular conference, most notably Notre Dame. My first plan would be to have each independent school join a conference that would make sense for them geographically, for example, Notre Dame would join the Big Ten, and Navy would join the Patriot League.

Once the independent teams join conferences, my idea for a 32-team tournament can take form. You can fill up 25 of the 32 seeds with the 11 champions from Division I-A and the 12 champions from Division I-AA. To fill up the other seven spots in the tournament, you would take the top seven teams from the AP poll that were not conference champions. By doing this you are now guaranteed not just the 32 top teams for the National Championship Tournament (working title) but a good mix of bigger schools, like Texas and Alabama, and the mid-majors like Hofstra and Appalachian State going for the true Division I National Championship.

One of the arguments that detractors use against the idea of a tournament is that there is the bowl system that has been in space since the 1902 Tournament East-West Game, which evolved into what we know today as the Rose Bowl. However, out of the 29 bowls that will be played, there are only seven that have any significance: the Rose, Sugar, Orange, Fiesta, Peach (Now known as the Chik-fil-a Bowl), Gator and Hawaii Bowls. My plan would call for eliminating all the bowls save for the previously-mentioned seven. From there, we would go back to the old ways of decided what team plays in a particular bowl by the bowl’s ties to certain conferences. For example, to this day, the Rose Bowl has the Big Ten champion play the Pac-10 champion. However, since the champions of each conference would, for the most part, advance far in the National Championship Tournament, the runners-up from each conference would be in the bowls.

Another purpose that the bowls would serve is that if a marquee team like USC gets eliminated in the first or second rounds of the tournament, they, being the Pac-10 champions, would slide into the Rose Bowl slot. By keep the seven marquee bowls open for teams who got upset, it would allow another game for them to play but not at the cost of a smaller school who rightfully beat them.

The main complaint that the higher-ups in college football have with implementing any sort of a playoff system is the money that would be lost from the eradication of most of the bowls. They couldn’t be farther from the truth since the amount of money that they could get from the networks just for the rights to air the tournament. To get an idea of the money this tournament could get, ESPN just bought the airing rights to the BCS from 2011 to 2014 for $125 million a year just for the five BCS games a year. The rights to not only air the tournament but the seven “Marquee Bowls” could garner double that. And that’s not even considering the ad spots, which could honestly rival the Super Bowl or the Oscars when it comes to ad rights.

What it all comes down to is that there is no reason at all not to do a tournament. The NCAA is insane and/or stupid for refusing to have two insanely massive lucrative and ratings-owning tournaments instead of just March Madness. It comes down to sheer unabashed stupidity, laziness or that these commissioners of the larger conferences and the NCAA are so in cahoots that they don’t want to change a damn thing. So, when you think about it, the higher-ups in college football do have a couple of reasons for not having a tournament. Those reasons are greed and laziness.