I can’t believe I’m about to write these three words – for the second straight year, yet: The BCS worked.
OK, that’s out of my system. That’s the last positive word you’ll get from me on this bastardization of athletics called the Bowl Championship Series. The BCS worked only because Florida won the Southeastern Conference championship and provided a viable No. 2 team to challenge Ohio State.
Sure, we’ll get a legitimate BCS title game Jan. 8. But there’s something innately wrong with a system designed to create that title game when:
For those counting at home, that’s five of the past seven seasons the BCS has left the nation throwing the bean dip at the TV. Is Florida really the second-best team in the country? Could the Gators go into frigid Columbus and play the unbeaten Buckeyes to within three points, as Michigan did?
We’ll never know. The BCS worked only because the majority of the nation eventually soured on a Michigan-Ohio State rematch. The term “majority” is used loosely. An ESPN poll showed no more than 53 percent didn’t want the rematch.
That’s not exactly the nation speaking.
Florida-Ohio State is what I wanted, which is why I think it worked, but the point is the process by which this matchup came about is flawed on so many levels.
Yes, it beats the old system. In 1997, Ohio State would be playing for the national title in the Rose Bowl against fading Southern California, which had a free-fall to eighth in The Associated Press poll. But if the BCS is the best the university presidents can do, then higher education in this country is in serious trouble.
How would you like to be a coach and decide your opponent? Jim Tressel’s vote in the USA Today coaches poll wouldn’t have mattered if he hadn’t abstained, but hypothetically it could have.
“Can you imagine if Coach Tressel voted for us,” Florida coach Urban Meyer said after the pairings were announced Sunday. “Can you imagine if he voted the other way?”
Meanwhile, Michigan coach Lloyd Carr is cursing Tressel under his breath all the way to Pasadena, where the Rose Bowl has its classic Big Ten/Pac-10 matchup. However, it has all the intrigue of the Final Four’s now-defunct third-place game from the 1970s. Maybe the parade will be good, but the game won’t.
Frankly, I can’t blame the voters for catapulting Florida over Michigan. I would have. But most pollsters voted against a rematch rather than a Florida-Ohio State game. They did it as a favor to Ohio State, which earned it. However, what does it say about a system when voters use the criterion of best teams in their rankings every week until the final one that really counts?
The leaky system reeks of such refuse Meyer couldn’t bask in the glory of living up to the Urban Legend. He was too busy filleting the system that’s providing his pedestal.
“It started two years ago when I started studying the system,” he said. “How do you keep (12-0) Auburn out?”
He is for a playoff: “There’s always a way to get something done if you get the right people to do it. It has to be done. Just, can it be done?”
No. Not now. Fox Sports has a contract to televise the BCS title game through 2010, and Fox executives have told me they have no intention of telling university presidents what to do.
Great. Fox can’t tweak the BCS, but it can get two couples to trade spouses on national TV.
Also, the architect of the ingenious Plus-One format, Bill Moos, recently resigned as Oregon’s athletic director. Think if Plus-One was in place now. The winner of the Florida-Ohio State game would play the new No. 2 team in the ensuing poll. It could be No. 3 Michigan if it beat USC, making a rematch legitimate. It could be No. 4 LSU if it beat Notre Dame.
And yet it still would make the regular season a win-or-else proposition. Who can afford to lose once and hope to stay within striking distance?
It also would allow us to discuss real football issues – Can Florida’s defense stop Troy Smith? How will Ohio State’s linebackers do against the spread offense? – instead of chastising a system that has been wrong for too long.
