Creating a College Football Playoff Would Be a Mistake

The Bowl Championship Series is the best system for determining a national champion in college football.

It may not be the most equitable system in all of sports, but it creates a regular season and conference championship games that are unparalleled in entertainment and meaning.

The regular season is a 12-game playoff where there are no excuses, nor is there any room for error or a mediocre non-conference schedule.

And it is because of these things that I am a supporter of the BCS, and, more importantly, I believe that a college football playoff would be a disaster.

It would just make for a regular season of much lesser value while propelling the goliaths of college football to far greater power than they have now.

Most people advocate for a playoff because they want to see teams from non-Big Six conferences like last year’s undefeated Boise State and Utah squads have a shot at winning a national championship.

However, none of those undefeated teams would have even gotten into a hypothetical four-team playoff in 2008.

Those spots would have gone to Oklahoma, Florida, Texas, and Alabama.

And while all of this year’s undefeated teams, and the loser of the upcoming Alabama-Florida game, may have hypothetically been able to get into an eight-team playoff, so also would two undeserving squads in the two-loss Oregon and Ohio State as of the Nov. 29 BCS standings.

And in the long run, even a four-team playoff would allow for any team from a major conference to pad their schedule with as many cupcake non-conference opponents as possible, go unscathed in their conference (regardless of how good it actually is), and use the notoriety of that conference to justify earning a spot in the playoff over someone of lesser status.

That would make for more teams from BCS conferences clogging up the top of the rankings with undefeated and one-loss records while also making it difficult for good non-BCS teams to schedule anyone that is good enough to allow them to prove to voters that they’re a top-four team.  

Plus, fans would be hurt the most by a college football playoff, as Big Six athletic directors would stop scheduling one-and-one non-conference games with fellow top-tier teams.

You would see many more San Jose State-USC games on TV than must watch showdowns like USC-Ohio State or Texas-Ohio State in 2005, and games that once meant the world like this Saturday’s Florida-Alabama SEC Championship Game or the 2006 Michigan-Ohio State game would become virtually meaningless.

Don’t get me wrong, there are worst things that could happen in the world than a college football playoff, but I just don’t believe that its implementation would be worth ruining what the BCS currently gives us.

And I think that there are other ways to give undefeated non-BCS teams a shot at a national championship.

For one, the BCS could alter its rules so that Big Six teams would have to play one fellow BCS opponent in the preseason and disqualify anybody who plays a DI-AA team from national championship consideration starting in 2014.

And they could eliminate conference championships for conference vs. non-conference championships, in essence creating a mini-playoff.

There are six conferences with automatic BCS berths and five without a guaranteed spot, so aligning the conferences by their overall geographic proximity (the Western Athletic Conference would play the Pac-10, the Mountain West would play the Big 12, etc) and allowing the SEC to continue to play its championship game because of the strength of both its west and east leagues would work.

This would eliminate more teams from national championship consideration, and thus give non-BCS teams a better shot at getting into the game if they beat their BCS opponent.

The 2009 Texas Christian and Boise State teams of the future may still not get into the national championship under this format despite going through “BCS Championship Week” unscathed, but at least they’d have a chance on a national stage to prove to voters that they could play with anybody with the two spots for that game still up in the air.

And more importantly, it wouldn’t mess with the greatest regular season in all of sports.

The BCS gives us fantastic football from August-through-January and makes games bigger than life.

Let’s not ruin a great thing just because it’s unfair to a couple of teams every year.