Taking the BS out of the BCS

[Note: This column appears in the Nov 30 edition of Flyer News]

In a year where nothing but the unexpected can be expected, it is certainly appropriate that college football fans everywhere still have no idea what’s going to happen.

The unexpected has seriously infected this year’s BCS season, and exposed an incompetent and flawed BCS system. This may sound like the same old song that Auburn sang in 2004, but this year and all the upsets that have come with it have changed the tune.

Normally, college football is largely without parody. The teams that should win normally do. But this year has been different – a good different. There have been a number of fantastic upsets this year – Stanford over USC, Kentucky over LSU, Illinois over Ohio State and Harvard over Yale, just to name a few.

Other championship-determining systems are structured to embrace the underdog, but not the BCS. The Olympic men’s hockey tournament found a permanent spot for the legendary 1980 U.S. Hockey team in the hearts of American’s everywhere. NCAA basketball’s March Madness tournament has given us the N.C. State Wolfpack’s championship run in 1983, George Mason’s run from CAA obscurity to a Final Four birth in 2006, and even provided a job for ESPN’s Joe Lunardi. Why can’t college football and the BCS give us the same?

It can give us all of that, and potentially more with a few alterations. Here are my suggestions:

First of all, every college team should play the same amount of games. There is no reason a team like Missouri should have to play an extra game which can ultimately do them no good. If they win, they’re still number one. If they lose, their season is done.

Unfortunately for Missouri, they do have to compete for a Big 12 Championship against Oklahoma this weekend. Meanwhile, Ohio State, USC and Georgia get to watch someone else win them a chance to play in a National Title game.

Missouri, with a loss this weekend, would finish the season at 11-2 and out of the National Title game in favor of Ohio State, even though the two Missouri losses would both come at the hands of a top-10 Oklahoma team – once at Oklahoma and once at a neutral site, whereas Ohio State’s lone loss came to a then unranked Illinois team at home.

With both a Missouri and West Virginia loss, Georgia could also potentially compete for the National Title without even winning their division. How can a team win a National Title if they can’t even win the SEC East? The short answer: they can’t, or rather, they shouldn’t.

Something needs to be done to institute a playoff system in the BCS. The “Big Six” conferences should all determine a winner somehow. Each conference would have their choice of playing a championship game or just crowning a regular season champion to determine a winner. Those six teams go on to play in the postseason playoff.

The remaining two spots in the eight-team playoff would go to two at-large bids from the remaining Division I-A conferences and the four independent teams. A formula much like the current BCS system could determine the two best teams from this category. This may seem like it creates the same problem for the small-conference teams, but less teams vying for two spots makes for better odds than the current system.

The eight teams that qualify for the postseason tournament are then ranked numbers one through eight by the BCS formula to determine the matchups. This playoff structure makes the BCS formula seem like a kick off wedge-buster instead of a starting quarterback in the football game of postseason championships. It’s still a factor, but it has less control over the final outcome. After that, a miraculous thing happens: the teams simply play to determine a champion.

I’m not saying its perfect, but this hybrid system may take the BS out of the BCS.