The BCS Goes To Washington

The NCAA needs a college football playoff. I’ve said it once (or twice) before, and I will say it again. Annually. It’s pretty simple, actually. No matter how many people you talk to, it seems that the overwhelming response is yes, there needs to be a playoff format for the top 4, 8, or 16 teams. But in 2009, we have another year, and another mess.

Sadly, the only people that don’t tend to agree with this are the school presidents and conference commissioners. We’ve heard all sorts of reasons to not have a playoff, most of which are incredibly lame and self-serving. Let’s be realistic here – the number one reason (unspoken, perhaps, after everything is said and done) is “maintaining the status quo”. Now the federal government – yes, the same government that is struggling with health care reform, the banking industry, and two wars – has put college football in the political spectrum. Please welcome H.R. 390, the College Football Playoffs Act. It’s good to see our government working on things that truly effect the population [sarcasm inserted here].

But seriously folks, this is what the law would look like:

“It shall be unlawful for any person to promote, market, or advertise a post-season National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) football game as a championship or national championship game, unless the game is the final game of a single elimination post-season playoff system for which all NCAA Division I FBS conferences and unaffiliated Division I FBS teams are eligible”.

Wow. That’s one of the most straightforward, intelligent things I have seem come out of the legislative process in this country in a long time.

But if you ask Bill Hancock, BCS executive director, you’d hear him proclaim that "with everything going on in the country, I can't believe that Congress is wasting time and spending taxpayers' money on football … we feel strongly that managing of college sports is best left to the people in higher education."

Apparently those in higher education are, well, better left doing higher education. And lest we forget, college football and higher education are not one and the same, especially if you look at graduation rates. So let’s keep those in higher education dealing with higher education, and those in college football dealing with the economic and marketing reality that is college football.

Try asking any player if they would want to settle a national championship on the field. I would bet that you would get a resounding “yes”. 

Ask the fans, those watching the games and paying the millions of dollars to support these college football programs. Oh, as a matter of fact, they already have: in a 2007 Gallup Poll, 85% of the American public disapproved of the BCS. And these are the people paying the bills.

All you have to do is look north of the border and take notes on a system that works - the Canadian college football national championship. If the BCS existed in Canada, my alma mater - Queen’s University – the 2009 national champion -  may not have had the opportunity to play for the national championship at all. A fine review of this has been written by Andrew Bucholtz here. You don’t even need to look elsewhere – the NCAA Division II has had a national playoff since 1973! Of course, nobody cares how it can or does work elsewhere – as long as it’s paying the bills the way it is, right here, right now, for the BCS.

Last year, I proposed a playoff format. I even put forward the brackets and a fully functional means of getting this job done effectively. In an upcoming post, I will present to you the 2009 version of December Delirium - the 2009 NCAA college football playoff, as it should be.

So, Rep. Barton, since you have sponsored the bill and you do live in Texas, feel free to give me a call sometime and we can sit down and get’er done.

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