Georgia head football coach Mark Richt was once asked why he supported the Bowl Championship Series instead of a playoff. "I think college football has the most exciting regular season of any sport because there is not a playoff system," he answered. "The whole season is a playoff system."
Perhaps the best reason for supporting the BCS can be summed up in three words: every game counts. Since teams know they will have to fight during the regular season for a spot in a bowl game, there are no games off. One loss and a team's post-season chances are diminished. Every play and every game count every year.
As a result of this emphasis on the regular season, college football is more exciting, more popular, and more successful than ever before.
Since the BCS began in 1998, attendance at college football games has increased 35%--from 27.6 million to 37.4 million last year. But not only are more people watching from the stands, more people are watching at home, too. In 2009, for example, 26.8 million viewers saw college football's title game between Oklahoma and Florida. How does that compare with other televised sporting events? The 2009 NCAA men's basketball championship game was watched by 17.6 million. The 2009 World Series between the Phillies and the Yankees averaged 19.3 million viewers per game.
Not only are more fans getting involved, but more schools are, too. Every conference has an opportunity to earn annual automatic qualification into the BCS. At the beginning of the season, every team has a chance to earn a spot in a BCS game, including the National Championship Game. Indeed, TCU came extremely close to playing for the championship this year. Teams from conferences without annual automatic qualification have played in the BCS in four of the last five years.
More schools are reaping the financial benefits, as well. Before the BCS's creation in 1998, only the teams and their conferences that participated in the major bowl games received revenue from those games. In the first 11 years of the BCS, more than $120 million was distributed to conferences that do not have annual automatic berths in the BCS bowls. The gross revenue for each conference that sends one team to the BCS is approximately $18.5 million. Each conference divides the money according to its own formula.
Part of what has made college football so exciting and popular in the BCS era is that the tradition and heritage of the bowl games have been preserved. The bowl experience is enjoyed by 68 universities each year with more than 7,000 student athletes and 10,000 other students participating as band members, spirit squad members, etc. No other sport has anything like the bowls. Many bowl games have their own parades and all bowl games have their own ceremonies and festivities. The chance for a student-athlete to play in a bowl game--and the chance for a fan to travel to one--is a memory that will last a lifetime.
In the end, the BCS should be judged like a football team: by its record. And the BCS record is outstanding.
This year, college football once again gave fans a dramatic regular season filled with meaningful games throughout the fall--who will ever forget Alabama surviving Tennessee with a blocked field goal in October or Texas edging out Texas A&M in a shootout in November? Plus, the BCS has once again produced a compelling lineup of five bowl games featuring the top ten teams, including two non-automatic qualifying schools squaring off in the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl. In addition, it will all be topped off on January 7 by a national championship matchup of the two teams that are number one and number two in all major polls: Alabama and Texas.
Does the BCS strengthen the regular season by making every game count? Yes it does.
Will the BCS be able to continue protecting the heritage of the various bowls? Yes it will.
Does the BCS do the best job of matching the top two teams in the nation? Yes it does.
Coach Mark Richt is right. With the creation of the BCS, the whole season is now a playoff. Today, college football is more exciting, more popular, and more successful than ever before.
Playoffs exist in every other collegiate sport, including all other football divisions. A Division I-A playoff system is in the best interest of fans, players, broadcasters, and advertisers. The interest and TV ratings for a true national championship playoff would dwarf the bowls.
But a few overly-powerful conferences are holding it back. That's the definition of corruption!
End of story
A playoff is the only true test of who is better. Opinions matter, but only so far as the end of the conversation. Play a game, get a winner, and there is no more bullcrapping.
Here is the best way to do it. Keep the rankings and then the top 12 teams in the country play an NFL style playoff, with the top four getting a bye. Eight become four, and then those four play the top four, and down we go till we have a champion. If you want the Bowl games to be the playoff sites, then so be it. And rotate the Championship Game between the major Bowls. Easy breezy. And no more 1994 Penn State debacles (who were only number 2 because JoePa was a sportsman and played his third string against Indiana instead of burying them by ten touchdowns, John Heisman style).
The SEC is the toughest conference the Big 12 is next so you all want to make it fair well why don’t we shuffle the conferences around and put Florida in the same conference as Boise or a Nebraska or LSU in with TSU. Why is it fair to let teams in very weak conferences have a shot at the championship while great teams like those that are in tough conferences that lose one game to a tough conference rival?
My Point is it will never be fair if you have kind of good teams in a crappy conference that gets to play in a tournament when good teams in a tough conference does not get a chance how fair is that?
When it comes to awarding a title of some sort in Division 1A, there are only opinions as to which team is best, and as far as I'm concerned, my opinion is the only one that matters. I'd say the best two teams played the other evening and Boise State emerged as the best team in the country.
And, no, I didn't watch the exhibition game scheduled for this evening. I'd already watched the best teams play, so any game after that would be a bit anti-climactic.
That says quite a bit about which teams are afraid of losing and which want top competition.
Were Boise State to play in a major conference, it'd regularly contend for a conference championship like any other good program. You can pretend otherwise all you wish.
Feel free to prove me wrong, though. Call up your favorite schools and ask them to schedule Boise State regularly. See how far that goes.
And all of that has absolutely nothing to do with the nature of the BCS exhibition games. The point still stands that bowl games are essentially meaningless and any title awarded is nothing more than somebody's opinion, and mine is still the only one that matters (for me, anyway). You can assign your title any way you see fit and it has no more authority than mine.
Technically speaking, each bowl game has a champion, so there are thirty bowl champions. Every team that won its exhibition game can claim to be a champion.
The BCS tries to take conference popularity and the amount of money the really big schools bring to it as a whole in to the equation and as long as it does that, it simply cannot produce a true "national champion" except for the years when they get lucky. The money and fans don't matter, they don't determine the best team. I'll grant that over the longer term, those big power conference schools will tend to produce stronger teams but there simply isn't any recourse for a "mid-major" like Utah or Boise. Likewise, the non-BCS conferences can only get an automatic bid if the top team is ranked high enough, that's almost impossible with the ranking system as it is.