BCS BS

Heard a wonderful commentary on NPR this morning by Frank Deford which got me thinking about college football. I'm a big fan of Va Tech, having spent 11 years in Blacksburg and eventually emerging with a couple of degrees. And it's nice to finally be one of the football elite that in my undergrad days, we resented and envied. But the whole BCS thing is a joke.

Division 1-A College football should have a playoff system. It would be simple to implement within the framework of the Bowl games. You simply use the BCS rankings to seed an 8 game tournament, and pick 7 bowls to host the 7 playoff games. Or maybe pick the top 6 and give the first two seeds a by in the first week. Then you have 5 Bowl games involved in the playoffs. And the excitement level among sports fans would be intense. It would rival the final four in NCAA Basketball.

It's amusing to hear proponents of the current Bowl system use the academic concerns of athletes as a rationale for the current flawed system. The fact that every other level of NCAA football implements a successful playoff system, with no significant impact on those true student athletes... athletes who in many cases aren't on athletic scholarship... shoots that argument down.

Still, it's only football. To say "College football NEEDS" a playoff system is silly. It doesn't NEED a playoff system. Noone is starving or dying because of the deficiencies in the system. At best, it's should only be athletic fluff that's a pleasant diversion. At worst, the BCS represents the corrupting effect that money has on our institutions of higher learning.

I don't think it's any worse then the idealogical corruption of Political Correctness that has infected many of our finest universities. But that's an entirely different argument.