Code Orange

Things fell out pretty much as expected:

National Championship: Ohio State vs. LSU
Sugar Bowl: Georgia vs. Hawaii
Orange Bowl: Virginia Tech vs. Kansas
Fiesta Bowl: Oklahoma vs. West Virginia
Rose Bowl: Illinois vs. Southern Cal

I guess I’m a little surprised that the Orange went with Kansas instead of West Virginia, but perhaps the Fiesta didn’t want an all-Big 12 matchup.

I think this season has shown more than any other that a playoff is needed. Sports Illustrated Online had a headline up earlier today which read “Give LSU a shot.” Well what happens if LSU takes that shot and misses? Well, sorry Oklahoma, Virginia Tech, and Georgia, LSU is the only team who is able to take that shot. Even if you ended up being the better team, tough. And of course, if LSU wins the championship, those teams won’t get their own shot at LSU.

The BCS doesn’t help itself by posting news stories which are written by people who sound like whiny children trying to defend something which they know is broken:

Now that the most compelling, entertaining and dramatic college football season in recent memory is drawing to a close, sportswriters and broadcasters are doing what they always do at this time of the year.

They’re crafting lies to convince you that major-college football is in disarray and in dire need of a playoff system to save itself.

Of course, it is ironic that this article was written before this weekend, and uses the basis that Missouri and West Virginia appeared to be a clear #1 and #2 to “prove” that the BCS works:

Right now the system has settled on MU and West Virginia. Those names are allegedly not big enough for some writers and broadcasters.

Oops. And of course, there is the usual “with a playoff, no one would care about the regular season!”:

Critics of college football won’t do that. The current, no-playoff system gives us great September and October story lines.

Of course, the problem with this is three-fold. The first is that in every sport with a playoff (i.e. every sport other than Division I-A college football), people still enjoy the regular season. Why? Because it still matters. You’re still playing to see who gets in the playoffs.

The argument for maximizing the meaning of the regular season, which is used to justify selecting two and only two teams to play for a championship, could just as easily be used to justify a system where no championship game is played at all. Heck, that’s the way to maximize the meaning of the season, isn’t it? Don’t even have a post season. Ohio State wins the title. Tough luck, LSU.

The second problem is that, ironically, in college football more than just about any other sport, the regular season gives you the least clear, most muddied picture of the landscape possible. In the NFL, for example, any given team plays 37.5% of the teams in the league. Not perfect, but at least it’s a third. Yet the NFL still puts 37.5% of the league into the playoffs, largely because, even with playing over a third of the league, you can’t necessarily declare the team with the best record champion, because they haven’t necessarily played everyone.

In college football it’s even worse. Any given team plays, at most, 10.8% of the teams, and that’s if you play a 12 game schedule, and a conference championship game, against 13 different I-A teams. No re-matches (as Missouri/Oklahoma and Virginia Tech/Boston College were) and no I-AA games (Appalachian State vs. Michigan anyone?). Most teams will play only 10% of I-A teams, and a good portion will play even a lower percentage than that.

Yet, we’re willing to select two - and only two - teams to play the championship. Teams who have played a combined 20% of Division I-A college football teams…maybe. In other words, 80% of all the teams in football have no direct say in who the national champion will be. So what’s this about the regular season being meaningful? In the current system, it is anything but meaningful. All 6 BCS Conference champions could go undefeated, and you’d still only have 2 teams who have played only 20% of all teams playing for the title. How is that even remotely fair or meaningful?

What if Division I-AA has this system? You’d probably have seen Northern Iowa vs. Montana in the championship game. It’s now the semifinals and both of those teams have been eliminated, and a third previously undefeated team, McNeese State, has lost as well. Tell Delaware, Southern Illinois, Appalachian State, and Richmond that they can’t have a chance at the national title because a team in another conference who they never even got a chance to play went undefeated against the few teams in the division that they actually play.

Third, having a playoff would eliminate the need for poll “corrections” like the ones we saw today - where all three polls felt compelled to “correct’ their rankings to make sure LSU got into the title.

What? Are you telling me that LSU really WASN’T the #7 team going into this past weekend? If not, why did you rank them there? If you never intended to put Georgia into the title game, why did you put them in a position where, if the impossible happened like it did on Saturday, they would be in line to play for the championship? If LSU was better than Georgia because they merely played in the conference title, why was LSU ranked below Georgia to start with? Or Why was Oklahoma ranked below them? Or Virginia Tech?

This is a matter of consistency for the polls, and to have the first 13 polls of the season be based on the previous poll with rewards and punishments for winning and losing, and then using the final poll as a do-over is dangerously close to scandalous in my opinion.

Do you really think that a 7-point win over a 4-loss Tennessee team who lead most of the game justifies jumping LSU 5 spots up? At least Oklahoma could theoretically argue for such a move since they convincingly defeated the #1 ranked team in the nation.

Meanwhile, Virginia Tech, who hasn’t lost to an unranked team all year and who avenged one of their losses convincingly Saturday, goes nowhere in the polls. How does this make sense other than people “deciding” that LSU was going to be #2 and that they were just going to “make it happen,” no matter how little sense it made given the current rankings.

Week after week, year after year, we hear people complaining how people vote in the polls, saying that you should vote for who you think the best team is, and not necessarily punish a team who loses but who clearly seems like the better team. Week after week, year after year, the voters ignore their own complaining and vote as they always have. That is until voting as they always have suddenly becomes inconvenient when they have a certain matchup for the championship in mind.

It would kind of like being an umpire in a baseball game who is calling balls and strikes a certain way and has called them in a consistent manner through a game. Then suddenly in the 9th inning they decide they want one of the two teams to win, but that team is trailing.  As a result they decide to change how they’re calling balls and strikes to try to ensure the team they want to win will win.

Sorry, if this is how you’ve been doing your rankings all season, it is disingenuous to suddenly decide to do a “do-over” because you put yourself into a position which would end with an undesirable result if you did your rankings like you always do.  Unfortunately there is little that anyone can do about it.