BCS Bullshit

Once again, there’s election trouble in Florida. But this time, it isn’t about hanging chads; it’s about college football. Put simply, the University of Michigan got jobbed. They got hosed by a system that is so badly flawed that everyone, even its creators, agrees it needs be seriously overhauled.

Michigan, the undisputed second-best team in the nation, will not be playing for the national championship. In its place, the Florida Gators will play instead.

But how could this be?, you ask. How could anyone other than the top two teams contend for the national championship? And that, my friends, is the question that has football fans around the nation scratching their heads, wondering how the bowl system could be so irreperably screwed up.

Michigan, Not Florida, Should Be Number Two

With Ohio State as the only undefeated team in college football, the debate is really about who gets to play against them on January 8. The winner of that game will be crowned national champion. And at the end of the day, the only serious contenders are Michigan on the one hand, and Florida on the other. So let’s see how they stack up.

Michigan has an 11-1 season record. Its marquee wins came against Notre Dame (11) and Wisconsin (7). Michigan’s only loss was to Ohio State, which is ranked 1. Florida, by comparison, is 12-1. It had marquee wins against Tennessee (17), LSU (4), and Arkansas (12). But Florida lost a game, too, against Auburn (9). Moreover, Florida almost lost to both South Carolina and Florida State, two teams that are utterly atrocious. Toward the end of the season, the Gators were streaking, but Michigan has been streaking all year long.

It’s pretty simple, really. Explain to me how a team who lost to ninth-ranked Auburn is going to the championship bowl over a team who lost to first-ranked Ohio State. Explain to me how a team that didn’t trail in the second half against any top 25-teams this year has been passed over by a team that was nearly beaten, twice, by teams that aren’t ranked at all.

You might whine about how comparing Michigan to Florida is like comparing cherries to oranges, because the SEC is allegedly such a strong conference this year. But, it turns out, that’s just not true. SEC teams are only 1-5 against non-conference opponents, while the Big Ten summoned forth three teams in the BCS’ top ten slots. The Big Ten is the stronger conference, period, and Michigan is the stronger team, period.

So ridiculous is the idea that Florida is better than Michigan that no serious sports writer in the nation has even bothered to suggest the notion. In a game between them, Michigan would win, and this is a fact that even some Florida fans have acknowledged. Bookies in Vegas have Michigan a six point favorite over Florida, if the two were to play.

Michigan Got Jobbed

So how did the Wolverines end up #3, and the Gators #2? Through a truly fucked up system of voodoo we call the BCS. The sole purpose of the BCS is to determine who the best two teams are. And there’s wide agreement that the best two teams are Ohio State and Michigan. So how the hell did Florida end up #2?

It started on Sunday morning, when Florida coach Urban Meyer went on national television and did the unthinkable: he started to lobby. He said his team “deserves a shot” against Ohio State. Michigan coach Lloyd Carr, meanwhile, sat back in shock; lobbying, to him, is beneath the sport itself.

But when the votes were cast, the lobbying paid off. In the Harris poll, Former Washington State coach Jim Walden actually voted Florida #1, ahead of Ohio State. Four other Harris poll voters ranked Michigan #4, behind two-loss LSU. All four of those voters were local sports writers, and all four of them, just a week earlier, had Michigan ranked ahead of LSU. So why the change? Even Urban Meyer admits it was to manipulate the outcome; “I think people thought Florida deserves a shot,” he said.

In the coaches’ poll, things got even more bizarre. LSU coach Les Miles voted Florida ahead of Michigan because he thought the SEC winner “deserves” an opportunity to play in the national championship game. Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops ranked Florida ahead because he thought having thirteen games in the season, instead of twelve, meant Florida was better. This is the sports equivalent of stuffing the ballot box.

But the biggest insult of all came from Ohio State coach Jim Tressel, who abstained. “It’s a conflict of interest for me to vote in this one,” he said. A conflict of interest!? It’s pretty simple, really: Who would you rather play, if you were Ohio State? If Tressel had voted for Michigan, the team he knows is better, the team that almost beat him, in his own house, well now that would be a good game. But Tressel would rather play against the weaker team, and get the easy title under his belt. So he did nothing to stand up to the blatant manipulation that was going on. He took the coward’s way out.

And in the end, the human polls decided that Florida would play in the national championship game, and not Michigan, because Florida “deserves a shot”.

The BCS Doesn’t Work

But the point of the BCS is not to determine who gets to play; it’s to determine who the two best teams are. Mitch Albom put it best: “This was all about the line of thinking that says, ‘Give someone else a chance.’ But if the system were about giving everyone a chance, they wouldn’t call it a poll. They’d call it a donkey ride.”

Believe it or not, there is actually a built-in procedure in the BCS by-laws that allows for rematches to be avoided. The infamous “Rule 5″ allows for the BCS organizers to re-seed teams based on a variety of factors, one of which is whether the two teams have already played. In other words, if Michigan had been voted #2, Florida could have still played in the title game. At least that would have been fair, and by the book. But to put Michigan in as #3, through some trickery and slight of hand, reduces a so-called “sport” to a mere popularity contest.

There are plenty of good reasons to slot Florida in the national title game. “The game shouldn’t have two teams from the same conference.” “The teams in the game should both be conference champions.” “The game shouldn’t be a rematch.” Hell, take your pick. Those are all excellent reasons to forego a Michigan appearance against Ohio State. But what we can’t allow is a system that purports to choose the best teams, and instead chooses which teams we’d like to see. No legitimate sport should allow for lobbying and stuffing the ballot box to determine its champion. By allowing such tactics, the BCS has reduced college football to a form of figure skating.

Since the BCS has been around, it has been controversial. In 2003, USC was ranked #1 in the BCS, and still didn’t get to play in the national title game. In its nine years of existence, the BCS has failed to accomplish its mission — an undisputed national champion — six times. Regardless of whether you’re pro-Florida or pro-Michigan in 2006, you can agree that the 2003 split-national-championship result was a preposterous failure of a system designed to avoid precisely such a result. Regardless of how you feel about the result this year, you can agree that the BCS has been a national disaster for nearly a decade now.

The problem with the BCS and its flawed human polling element is that it establishes subjectivity as the arbiter of the championship, instead of the playing field.

Some, including Michael Rosenberg of the Detroit Free Press (his column on this issue is here), have argued that the old pre-BCS system is actually better than what we have now. I have no doubt that my buddy Todd will say the same. And there’s something to be said for the good ol’ days, when the debate about who would win some hypothetical game was half the fun.

But these days, it’s not fun. Because these days, we have a system that’s supposed to determine a national champion, and instead — as we saw Sunday — is as easy to manipulate as Brady Quinn is to tackle. If we’re going to have a national championship system in college football, let’s at least get one that works.

Toward A Playoff

The thing is, we already have such a system. We use it in every other sport, and it’s called a playoff. Baseball is an easy example. The Tigers beat the Yankees, and the Athletics beat the Twins. Then, the Tigers beat the Athletics. Twins fans can’t complain that they never got a shot to beat the Tigers — true as that may be — because they did get a shot to beat the A’s, and the A’s then fell to the Tigers. In playoff systems, the controversy generated by the BCS simply doesn’t exist, because the scoreboard — not some goddam poll — is the true arbiter of the championship. That’s why they call it a “sport”, and why the BCS is more accurately a beauty pageant. Champions are so titled because they win the crucial games, not because they’re elected. That’s the whole point of a playoff.

I have long advocated a 32-team playoff system for college football. And yeah, that’s probably unrealistic. But you could easily have a playoff system with six teams, and you could keep the present bowl games exactly as they are:

Week 1: 1 and 2 get a bye. 3 vs. 6, 4 vs. 5.

Week 2: 1 plays lowest-ranked winner, 2 plays highest-ranked winner.

Week 3: Championship game.

There are lots of different ways to do this, and mine proposed here isn’t necessarily the best. But any of them, so long as they are a playoff format, would deliver an undisputed national champion.

But until that day arrives, 2006 will have to be chalked up as yet another year of college football controversy and national championship failure. The only undisputed thing about this year’s season is that Michigan damn near beat Ohio State, on a bad field at home, and would probably beat them again on neutral ground. Why else do you think Jim Tressel decided not to vote on Sunday?

But the Wolverines won’t get that chance. And that’s, well… that’s bullshit.