Sports Product Review

Who is the best college football team in the nation? Ohio State? LSU? Conventional wisdom at the time of this writing says we’ll see those two play for the National Championship. But how about USC? Oklahoma? Georgia? We’ll never know, because again, the BCS has made a mockery out of what used to be the greatest sport in America. Now, what inarguably has been the wildest and most exciting season in history, is going to fizzle out in a season-ending sham that will satisfy no one, except, perhaps, the BCS Commissioners.

The BCS has ruined college football. In December of last year I wrote how, in my view, the BCS was not only not an improvement on the old simple voting system it replaced, it was a step backward. I called for a return to the old system because the BCS does not ensure that the two truly best and most-deserving teams will play for the national championship, but it does eliminate the luster of the major bowls. Remember what New Year’s Day used to be like? You’d wake up groggy from the night before, depressed because it was the last day of the holiday season and a long winter of going back to school or work loomed ahead, but there was reason to smile. The best day in all of sports was waiting for you. After appetizers of Cotton and Gator, you'd be feasting on main courses of Sugar, Rose, Fiesta and Orange. All the games were meaningful. Often, three or four teams had a legitimate shot at the National Championship depending on how things shook out that day.  Instead of that final holiday before the coming dreary winter being something to dread, the glory of those games was like a goodbye kiss from a beautiful girl. And while the outcome of those bowls didn’t always leave us satisfied that the best two teams in the country had settled it on the field, (too many times the champion was more a popularity contest…see 1993 when Notre Dame and Florida State both finished with one loss and Notre Dame had beaten them head-to-head but the voters picked “aw shucks”, Bobby Bowden because he’d never won one before), is it any different this year? Even with the BCS, it’s all going to come down to opinion.

But now, not only do we not get to see the National Championship settled definitively, (nor did we last year - right, USC fans?), but we lose the thrill of that New Year’s Day culmination. Do you really care anymore who plays in the any of the BCS bowls? The Rose is still nice for its pageantry, and because it is on New Year’s Day, but the system even spoiled that this year because it will now likely be match-up of the Pac 10 Champion USC, and, drum roll please...the Big Ten Runner-up, Illinois. Whoopee. And then the Sugar, Orange and Fiesta in subsequent days are games that will decide nothing other than where teams finish in the Top 10. Who cares?

To me, the solution is so clear it is frustrating that I don’t hear it being screamed from every pundit in the country. Play the four major bowls on New Year’s Day as an elite eight. How’d you like to see these games on January 1, 2008? Rose: USC – Ohio State. Sugar: LSU – West Virginia. Orange: Georgia – Virginia Tech. And Fiesta: Oklahoma against, let’s say, Hawaii since they’re 12-0. And if you want to quibble that maybe Kansas or Missouri get in instead of West Virginia or Hawaii, fine. But the bottom line is every one of those games would be edge-of-your-seat viewing. Then, on January 8, the winners of those games would treat us to a bombshell Final Four, and the following week there would be a National Champion that no one could dispute.

Or just go back to the way it was. Everything the BCS was supposedly formed to accomplish, (no two-loss teams winning a title while one-loss teams are left out, the end of subjective voting to decide the champion), has flown out the window. And it’s been at the expense of the bowl games that used to make up the greatest one day in all of sports. Now, New Year’s Day is nothing more than the last day of vacation. A day to take down the decorations, nurse a headache, think about work or the year ahead, and maybe have a game on in the background. Thanks to the BCS, what used to be a sweet farewell kiss that could keep us warm as we waited for spring, has turned into a slap in the face.

Source: BCS