Voice of Dissent: BCS vs. Playoff System Debate

The number one topic of conversation this college football off season has been the failure of the BCS conference commissioners and school presidents to even discuss the possibility of the vaunted, long-awaited, NCAA College Football Tournament. You can’t open a sports page or check a CFB website without reading the latest malcontent lamenting the lack of a playoff system to determine the National Champion.

These self-appointed "advocates" of all college football fans endlessly re-hash the same, tired complaints without end, continually feeding off of each other’s unhappiness as they bash the BCS, it’s component conferences (especially the Big Ten and Pac-10), and college football in general for not yielding to what (supposedly) every football fan is losing sleep over; whether or not the “national champion” this year will be legitimate.

Well, here’s my voice of dissent; these bloggers and naysayers don’t speak for me.  I don’t want a 16-team playoff. I’m not entirely sure I want a plus-one for that matter.

Right about now the handful of readers I’ve managed to accrue are probably uttering profane remarks concerning my mental health, loyalty as a fan, and qualifications to write anything at all, But hear me out:

The purpose of the college football season is not to determine a National Champion, or even conference champions.

You read me right. We don’t have three glorious months of regular-season games followed by a few rather dull weeks of bowl games to find out who the best team in college football is. That has never been the aim of the sport, and I don’t think it ever should be. If this is what we want, the regular-season is an anachronism from days when we actually enjoyed the individual games our teams played, rather than the conference/national title implications.

If the point of the sport is to crown a National Champ, then we need to scrap the season and play a 120-team playoff.

Admit it; this is the only way to ensure absolute fairness, and give every team an equal shot at the crown. I’m not going to fall into the BCS-er trap and claim this is what we’ll get to if we go to plus-one, but to me, this is the only reasonable position to have if you’re one of the fans who loses sleep over whether or not Georgia deserved the national title last year.

No, hold on, that’s not fair either, because with random upsets, injuries, and the cohesion that can form over a regular season in the great teams, we need to have more games than that. How about a 120-team round-robin schedule to ensure that every possible match-up is decided on the field?

Since teams do change so much over the season, we’ll probably need another 119 games per team in an effort to ensure maximum fairness. Also, each school would have to come up with the same number of fans cheering at the same volume the same amount of time wearing equally inspiring shades of color in their clothing, and all match-ups would take place on neutral fields in climate-controlled indoor fields. Oh, and the game would be played by robots-tiny ones.

This is not slippery-slope, because no one honestly believes plus-one leads to this, but rather, this is a picture of what you have to support if you want a true, legitimate national champion. You would need every possible matchup under all possible circumstances to ensure absolute fairness. It’s impossible, but anything short of that won’t produce a 100% accurate national championship. So what you’re really advocating is maybe a 60-70% accurate national champ.

If that’s good enough for you, fine, but be honest when you’re blogging about the perfect world of a 16-team playoff.

Writers Note: This article was written before Maisel defended the BCS on ESPN