It's never been more apparent that college football needs a playoff. The Mythical National Championship is a rematch that includes a team that didn't even win their conference, for Christ's sake. The rest of the BCS games include the Sugar Bowl featuring two teams ranked outside the top ten that either got annihilated in or didn't play for their conference championship (Tech and Michigan), the Rose Bowl featuring a team who should of, at most, split their conference title (Wisconsin), and the Fiesta Bowl with a team who finished second in their conference (Stanford) playing an Okie State team that should probably be playing for the title (not saying they're better, but they deserve the chance to play LSU). It's awful. While I personally think Bama and LSU are the best teams, there's no way we'll ever know because OSU will never play LSU (...for the championship this season, anyway).
Meanwhile, Boise State, ranked 7th, is going to the MAACO Las Vegas Bowl, 10-2 TCU is playing int he Poinsettia Bowl, Arkansas and K-State (which should be the Sugar Bowl match-up) are featured in the Cotton Bowl, and the No. 9 team in the nation (South Carolina) is playing in the Capital One Bowl. While the BCS has shown strong favoritism toward the SEC in prior years, this year they screwed us like a Taiwanese prostitute. How is it that the 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th ranked teams all got left out of the BCS? How is it not clear that the system is incredibly flawed and only works when there is an equal distribution of competition in the field? Imagine for a second that we had a playoff this season. Let's say it was an Aussie Rules Playoff, my personal favorite.
First of all, an Aussie Rules bracket would look like this:
No. 1 vs. No. 4
No. 2 vs. No. 3
No. 5 vs. No. 8
No. 6 vs. No. 7
The bottom two match-ups are elimination games. The winner of those games moves on to challenge the losers of 1v2 and 3v4, while the winners of the 1v2 and 3v4 match-ups get a week 3 bye. Furthermore, the highest ranked loser plays the lowest ranked winner. From there it plays out like a 4 team playoff. More importantly, there are NO rematches. Here's how it could potentially go down:
Round 1
(1) LSU vs. (4) Stanford
(2) Alabama vs. (3) Okie State (that would settle the debate now, wouldn't it?)
(5) Oregon vs. (8) Kansas State
(6) Arkansas vs. (7) Boise State
Could anyone complain about those match-ups? I think it would be hard to argue that these aren't the best teams in the nation. Let them play and see what happens. Don't dictate based on revenue production. That's all the BCS is about, and it is ruining college football. Take a look at this chart from my research paper on the antitrust issues surrounding the BCS:
| BCS Revenue Distributed 2004-2005 through 2010-2011: | $1,021,673,349 |
| Non-BCS Revenue Distributed 2004-2005 through 2010-2011: | $537,337,593 |
| Total NCAA Revenue Distributed: | $1,559,010,942 |
| BCS Revenue as a Percentage of Total Revenue Distributed: | 65.53% |
How can this be allowed? 65 percent of postseason revenue goes to BCS Bowl participants. When there have only been 7 mid-major appearances since its inception, that's a problem. Mid-majors are already second rate in terms of recruiting and marketing abilities, giving top tier conferences more and more money each year only furthers that disparity and creates an uneven playing field. Something needs to be done. Hopefully this year's debacle will help.
