As we begin to reflect on our Tiger Cats suffering another heart-breaking elimination from the CFL playoffs, our attention turns to NCAA football, the most unpredictable, intense, exciting and entertaining football of its kind. The NFL for all the flawlessness they show can't be as entertaining and riveting as College football and this season has become probably the most exciting in a long time, as two non-AQ schools and a certain PAC-10 team are all redefining conventional wisdom.
Right from the get-go, the BCS system of ranking and seeding is still taking a hit and with good reason. There is no objective method to rank teams other than having a playoff system in place to actually give it legitimacy. The problem with the BCS system lies in its inability to truly gauge how one team would truly play the other on a neutral field. Furthermore, there are conferences that get a free pass to the bigger bowl games, and also get a bigger chunk of the money, regardless of the outcome. And in the end the BCS system is more about the money than it is about finding the undisputed champion.
It's an exclusive club, which unlike March Madness, has a well-defined criteria. The seeding system for the national tournament is performance based and not subscriber/conference based. After all, the bowl game is the game that determines not just the victor, but who gets the pie and how much of it. It's the moment that assess your program and the bigger the bowl, the bigger the payout. Once again, it's the money.
There really is only one way to determine which is the better team. Put them on the field and see what happens. There is no alternative and no system of speculative statistics will be able to substitute that.
The BCS is really a poor attempt at hiding the most prevalent weakness with the college football system itself. There are so many teams and such diverse levels and forms of play and even worse, not enough time to truly find the champion. There are leagues that have a defined championship format in which conference finalists and champions are crowned, advancing to represent their conferences all the way to the final. Of course I won't be completely disingenuous, dismissing the fact that there are more than 20 conferences, each having a certain level of play. The only solution to this problem is to promote and relegate teams to higher and lower level conferences, which means having a affiliation system.
In the end, there should be at least 16 or 32 teams to start the playoffs and they are the ones who should be guaranteed a berth in a bowl game. The conference championship game is played starting in December and from that point, we have a ladder. The defeated teams go to the smaller bowl games and the winning teams advance to the bigger bowl games. And in the end, there should be a draw to determine what role the respective bowl games will play. So the Citrus, Orange, Fiesta, Sugar, Cotton and Rose Bowls would be used to host the four quarterfinals and two semi-finals, leading up to the National Championship.
So what will this mean? For one thing, it means that a certain college that thinks they're too good to be in a conference should start considering joining one, especially one that espouses the level of play they delude themselves to believe they can perform. It means a lot of work in putting the colleges into conferences they belong in. It could even bring up a level of intensity that people have been crying out for. It is more likely that it will start with 32 conference finalists, leading to regional playoffs, to have one undisputed East champion and one undisputed West champion facing each other for the national championship. It may not be perfect, but it will certainly be better than the monopolistic, exclusive and subjective system already in place.
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