Cursed With Ambition

The BCS Stands for "Steaming Pile of Shit That Soulless Corporate Types Who Run College Football Make the Fans Eat" and Other Stories

1. Fuck the BCS.  No seriously, find its orifice and insert the biggest and most painfully shaped phallus you can find (preferrably heated to 1000 degrees) and reapeatedly ram the shit out of it unitl it is literally fucked to death.  I vow that I will not watch a college football game in 2011, and I will start a boycott movement to encourage others to do the same, if there is not at least an 8 team playoff in place for that year's season.

2. The above isn't just about Texas getting jobbed.  The whole system is just ridiculous.  I could accept it if there was a logical or moral reason, but there's not.  It's all about money, plain and simple.  Any conference commissioner or university president who says otherwise is a money-grubbing soulless liar.  I just can't continue to follow a sport, as much as I love it, that determines it's champion in such an offensive way and lies to its devotees so shamelessly.

3. There are a million people out there who have all spent too much time thinking about it who have proffered their "playoff plan" complete with arguments why it is good.  I haven't devised the perfect college football playoff system because I'm not going to spend the time to do it.  The right plan is out there taking into consideration all factors and giving them each appropriate weight.  Motherfuckers in charge just pick one and put it in place.  Before 2011.

4. If the bowls have to die, so be it.  They are from a bygone era and a bowl for a bowl's sake doesn't have any meaning today.  College football has evolved to a point where it needs a playoff system and the bowls are (one of the things) standing in the way.  They should become a nostalgic bit of history in college football.  The Gipper and shit.

5. The irony here is that I think OU and Florida are the two best teams in the country right now as far as off-field observation can tell you.  (Note the HUGE qualifier.)  I like Texas against either of them, though, and I'd really, really, really like to see it on the field.

6. Colt for Heisman.  Even though it would be a nice consolation prize for the program, I worry that if he wins it that psychologically he won't have as much to play for next year when we have another chance at a national championship run.

7. While we're at it, we need to clean house in D-1.  There are too many teams.  Normally, I wouldn't care about that.  I like Cinderella stories and all, but fans of Utah, Boise St., BYU, TCU, Hawaii and all of the rest who whine and complain every year about the unfairness of being left out of the BCS bowls make me laugh.  One Boise St. vs. OU game aside, these chumps are not in the same league as the major programs.  They needlessly complicate the issue when their bloated record was built on victories over even bigger chumps.  Every team in the WAC, Sun Belt, MAC and many teams in the Mountain West and C-USA should be demoted to a lower division.  That would leave close to 70 teams in the top tier.

The BCS Rant

You know, if Blake Gideon's breadbasket didn't have a giant hole in the bottom of it or if Earl Thomas' body-eye coordination hadn't failed him for three tenths of a second at the end of the Tech game this post wouldn't be necessary.  Beyond that, if the Big XII had the ability to account for all tiebreaker possibilities or even just copy their sister conferences who have conference championship games, this post wouldn't be necessary.  For that matter, if we just had a goddamned playoff this post wouldn't be necessary.  But, alas, we don't live in a perfect world.  That seems to be my curse and that of us all.

By now, everyone knows all of the macro- issues.  I don't want to rehash those things because they are the effects of underlying causes.  No, I want to get into the molecules of the thing. 

Let's agree that the point of all competition is to reach the apex, to be the best after beating the competition.  The apex, and the path to get there, are defined by the rules of the competition.  In an individual football game, the best is the team that can score more points than the other team.  In a season, where the broadly recognized ultimate goal is to be crowned National Champion, the way in which you accomplish the goal is convoluted and shitty.  Let's review:  for your team to play in the National Championship game they have to be ranked No. 1 or No. 2 in the BCS Rankings.  The BCS Rankings use a complicated formula consisting of data from two national polls and five sets of computer rankings, which in themselves use a complicated set of factors given varying degrees of weight and apply high level math.  First, the polls.  These are the AP and the Coaches Poll.  The AP poll consists of mostly writers, I think, who cast ballots listing the top 25 teams in order.  The Coaches Poll is just that - football coaches, but not all of them, list their rankings from 1-25 on a ballot.  The AP ballots are public but the Coaches ballots are not until the final week of the season.  The biggest complaint against the polls is that they tend to follow regional biases.  For example, a newspaper guy from New Jersey is more likely to rank east coast teams more favorably than a writer from LA and vice versa.  Because the ballots are public (mostly), this reins in some of the bias, but even then there is enough subjectivity involved that any voter can drop or raise a team 4-5 slots without having to answer for it.  That can make a big difference where the margins are so narrow, as they are this year.  The coaches have even more incentive to do anything but rank the teams objectively.  Bottom line is that the polls invite politicking and have a history of bias and lack of objectivity and they are therefore a wholly inaccurate method for selecting a champion of anything, much less of something so followed as college football.

Next, the computer rankings.  People used to bristle at the notion of a computer selecting, or even being part of the formula of selecting, a national champion in football.  I think as people grow more comfortable with computers some of the closed-minded resitance goes away, but there's still something really wrong with it.  First, there's no way that a computer can take into account everything that goes into being a champion.  Being a champion of sport, especially one so physical as football, is visceral and completely human.  You may be able to quantify and reduce to numbers certain aspects of what that means, but a computer simply cannot grasp, or worse, redefine, what it means to be a champion.  Sport is a human endeavor, after all, and to simply turn it over to a calculator instead of doing the math in our heads is cheating.

By analogy, the BCS is much like saying that in order to win the blue ribbon for the best baked apple pie that you have to be the best apple grower.

So, really, the essential problem is how do you define a winner.  Right now it is defined as the team who can end the season as the number one ranked BCS team.  Not the best team.  Not the team that won every game they played.  Not the team with the best players.  The system rewards the team that is the best at the BCS system, which really may not have very much to do with football at all.  The system rewards all sorts of things like scheduling chump teams, having a likeable coach, being from a conference without a conference championship game, being from a major conference, publicity and hype among other things that have nothing to do with the actual play of the teams on the field.  Of course, the system rewards good play and winning as well, more than the other factors even, but when the margin of separation between teams is razor thin, those other factors have to make up the difference.

College football crowns its champion in a way not only different from every other major college and professional sport in the world, it differs vastly.  And what's worse, college football has attempted to redefine what it means to be a champion by introducing all of these non-football factors.  Tournaments and playoff systems are the most widely utilized method of crowning a champion for most sports.  Granted, playoffs and tournaments aren't perfect and they reward only certain characteristics as well, but at least it's consistent, widely recognized as valid and it leaves very little room for questions.

College football fans are being sold a bill of goods and it's high time something changed.  For any college president or conference administrator to say that keeping the current system in place is about anything other than money is to insult our collective intelligence.  That in itself, is enough to leave it behind for me.  The only way to inflict change is to hurt the bottom line and the only way to do that is to incite a boycott of college football.  We could do it.  It would take a huge effort, but we could do it.  I'd say boycott college football in 2010 (we've got to give them a year to set it up) if they don't institute a playoff system.

For this year, it's lost.  I will forever mark this year's season and champion with one enduring symbol: