Denied Again: BCS Rejects Playoff System Yet Again

It seems that BCS presidents have their fingers in their ears when it comes to a playoff, because they certainly aren’t listening to popular demand.

According to ESPN, BCS presidents have rejected a Mountain West proposal that would form an eight-team playoff that would give conferences outside of the “Big Six” (Pac-10, Big 12, ACC, Big East, SEC, and Big Ten) a chance at the national championship.

Here’s what Oregon president and outgoing committee chairman David Frohnmayer had to say on the issue:

“In the last six years, I’ve read pundits, heard the pronouncements of broadcasters and collected several cubic feet of e-mail printouts from advocates of an NFL-style playoff system. Even those that go beyond sound-bite certitude share two intertwined and fatal deficiencies: They disrespect our academic calendars and they utterly lack a business plan.”

I have two big problems with his argument, which, like most arguments from the BCS, are pretty flimsy anyway:

The first big problem is a problem that most athletic programs have, and that is the so-called “disrespect” of academic calendars. There are two big problems with this argument. 

First, most postseason games are usually played during most colleges’ winter breaks, which are a couple months anyway. If the bowls, which start sometime near Christmas and don’t end until just after New Years’, don’t severely affect academic calendars, what on earth makes you think that a playoff will do any worse?

An eight-team playoff, which the Mountain West proposed, would take, at its longest, three weeks if you played a game every week.

It would definitely take less time than the current bowl system, which makes this argument against a playoff system absolutely ridiculous and completely without merit.