More Ranting About The BCS

Since the first BCS poll was released today, it seemed fitting to add to prior ranting in this area. So, here are mine.

Until college football conducts a true national championship, the BCS approach to determining a national champion ought to be modified to improve the fairness of the process.  I say this because the present BCS methodology can never be really fair for a number of reasons, the most compelling are:

First, the BCS is based on polls.  Results from past years show that pollsters do not have any better idea which team ought to be ranked more than a knowledgeable fan.  Prominent examples are Boise State beating Oklahoma in the Fiesta bowl, Utah beating Alabama in the Sugar bowl, and Ohio State beating Miami for the national championship.  Indeed, week after week college football teams expose the talking heads on ESPN and Fox by winning when the TV “experts” profess that they should lose.

This is why the poll method of arriving at who gets to play in a national championship is flawed.  For, if pollsters knew who was going to win, there wouldn’t be any need to play the games.  

Second, poll voters, and the TV talking heads that influence them, talk out of both sides of their mouths.  At the end of 2008, these “experts” supported their positions by referring to the “body of work” when they placed one team above another.  Yet, in 2009, they ranked Florida number one before Florida had played a top 25 team, while other deserving programs (e.g., Alabama) had played ranked teams.

It would be nice to have some intellectual integrity exhibited in this area. In the final analysis, they bring their biases into the polling process as often as they can get away with doing so. Indeed, they may intentionally be trying to influence poll voters (herd instinct at its worst) to vote for the teams the networks want to see play (money talks).

Third, rankings are based primarily on won-loss record—which is sometimes corrupted by officiating mistakes.  There are several excellent examples of this in the past couple of weeks. First is the celebration penalty in the LSU/Georgia game.  This call obviously changed field position and likely allowed LSU to win the game.  Indeed, the SEC apologized to Georgia for the official’s error. 

The second is the Ohio State/USC game.  Early in the game, USC scored on a fourth and goal. A revealing picture, posted on the Bucknuts website, shows the ball carrier’s knee down and the ball clearly not over the goal line. This was missed by replay officials. It likely cost OSU a win—and gave one to USC.  (It can be viewed at: http://bucknuts.com/index.php/General-Article/bucket-of-bullets-sept-20-edition.html ). Thus, USC is now ranked higher than they ought to be.

Finally, in Florida’s win over LSU there was an obvious, non-called offensive pass interference that resulted in a Florida touchdown.  This official non-call should be considered by poll voters when they vote. Similarly, Florida’s last touchdown against Arkansas was benefited by two personal foul calls, both of which were bogus as pointed out by Gary Danielson.

I understand that official won-loss results cannot be changed. But this type of error should temper the human and computer poll voting.  With the ability to review game-determining officiating errors after the fact, maintaining the fiction of won-loss records created by officiating mistakes offends reality in the poll voting process.

Game determining officiating errors should be reviewed by a panel of experts, and the won-loss records adjusted for purposes of poll voting.  The officiating errors (payoffs in some cases?) should be chronicled and distributed to all voters for inclusion in their decisions. Or, better yet, a panel of experts would make adjustments to the BCS rankings by lowering or raising total poll points based on the degree of impact an officiating error had on a game's outcome.  Tough to do, I know, but the present system is worse since most voters have no idea about what happened in a game. They simply vote based on the final score.

Fourth, the SEC and the PAC 10 have home field advantage in the BCS national championship game.  And home field advantage is huge in college football.  The Sugar and Orange bowl are essentially SEC home games and the same is true for the PAC 10 in the Rose and Fiesta bowls.  Florida and LSU have had home field advantages when they beat Oklahoma and Ohio State, respectively, for national championships. This bias needs to be eliminated.  I suspect results would have been different had these games been played in Austin, Texas and Cleveland, Ohio.

Fifth, a loss is just a loss. It means one top-ranked team was better than another top-ranked team on that day. The NFL provides an excellent example of this poll biasing phenomenon.  Just because New England beat the NY Giants in a 2007 regular season game was no guarantee that they would win in the Super Bowl.  And they didn’t.  In different settings, with different ball bounces and adjustments, results vary.

Finally, the present system is biased against excellent coaching jobs, teams that play other highly ranked non-conference teams and lose close games, teams that are young and lose games early, but are playing at a top-16 level by the end of the season, and teams with key injuries early in the season.  An excellent 2009 example is Oklahoma. They lost two games primarily due to an injury to their quarterback and three point loss to Texas.  Once Sam Bradford is back, they will likely be a top ten team capable of winning the national championship. They won’t get the chance.

Except for a few traditionalists, most fans and experts agree that the poll-based BCS method is the poorest way to determine a national champion.  This is because it is unfair to many hard-working, worthy teams, defies the rules of elementary logic, and, is sportsmanship deficient.

Most experts feel that a 16 team playoff would eliminate many of the troublesome issues accruing to the BCS method. A playoff is way past due.