BCS system proves faulty, unfair, absurd

by Jerrod Carr, staff writer

Any follower of college football is familiar with the Bowl Championship Series. 

Most would agree that the BCS system is faulty, and often cheats the best teams.

We are closing in on the end of the college football season, and with that comes bowl games.  All college teams make it their goal to make it to some form of a bowl game.  But the elite strive to make it to the BCS bowl games, the games that are for champions. 

While many times the best teams in the nation do land a spot in the BCS games, there are several who are left out of the mix, and must settle for a lower-tier bowl game.  There are only five BCS games, the Rose Bowl, Fiesta Bowl, Sugar Bowl, Orange Bowl, and the FedEx National Championship game.  One of those five is the national championship game, while the others are, in a sense, mini national championship games.

The BCS system is unfair and is based on what computers compute.  At times it places teams in the national title game that have no business being there.  For instance, in the 2007-2008 season, the LSU Tigers played for the national championship and they had two losses.  There were several one-loss teams that had a better claim to the title, but because LSU won the SEC championship, they were basically guaranteed a place in the game.  The best remedy for this situation is a college playoff system. 

The system would work like any other playoff system would.  You would take the top eight teams in the country and let them kill each other until the national champion is crowned.  The number one seed would play the number eight seed; two would play seven, and so on and so forth.  The system would be a three-game playoff, with the final game being the national championship game. 

How would the top eight teams be determined?  I believe the best way to determine the top eight teams would be to take the AP or Coaches poll after the conference championships have been played.  The teams that are in the top eight at the end of the season get to play in the playoffs. 

The only argument that I foresee being made toward this idea is that some teams may be at a disadvantage.  The reason I say this is that there are some teams that don’t play as many games as other teams.  For instance, USC which is in the PAC 10, plays only 12 games during the regular season because they don’t have a conference championship game.  Texas, from the Big 12, could play in 13 games because the conference has a championship game.  Therefore, Texas could be a little more tired and at a disadvantage. 

Is this a problem?  No, it is not.  If the time layout that the BCS system uses was followed, the teams would have an adequate amount of time to recuperate.  However, if that timeline was used, the season wouldn’t be over until the end of January.  To fix this problem, instead of taking almost a month in between ending the regular season and beginning the BCS games, they should only take two weeks. 

What about all of the other teams that are elite teams but were unfortunate and were not in the top eight, what would they do?  So everyone stays happy, I believe college football should keep the rest of the bowl games in place.  We have entirely way too many bowl games, but society today is about building confidence.  What better way to do so than let everyone play in December?

With a playoff system, the team that truly deserves the title of national champion would receive it, because they played through the hardest teams in the nation and came out on top.  This is why the BCS system used today is not only unfair, but completely absurd.