College Football 2011: How ESPN, Fandom and Modern Technology Killed the BCS

This is not another droning on about why a playoff system needs to be implemented in college football, but rather, an article on how America, the Internet and ESPN have made the BCS obsolete.

The BCS system makes sense. It doesn’t feel like it because it seems to violate the essence of competition by placing a somewhat arbitrary numbering system to the best programs in the country and then determining which two deserve a shot at the National Championship.

As a matter of fact, 50 years ago, the BCS would have made perfect sense, and the implementation of the playoff system would have felt unnecessary. The idea of making something that could produce the kind of Cinderella stories that the NCAA tournament does for men’s basketball is wishful thinking at best. This is college football.  The strong survive.  And even when a team upsets they get exposed soon enough.

Make no mistake: We need a playoff system, and it’s partially our fault.

It's partially ESPN’s and partially the endless need for information. This thought occurred to me on my last trip to Las Vegas. The wife and I love Vegas and go as much as we can. It’s a break from the norm for two homebodies who rarely gamble, and it’s the only place where you can see a hooker, a Storm Trooper, a fist fight and a transvestite all within the time it takes to get from New York, New York to the Bellagio (of course, this is null and void if you are a transvestite Storm Trooper who likes to fight and hook, but I’m guessing most aren’t).

The wife and I have the means to stay at most of the casinos on the main strip. Of course, choosing a hotel isn’t that hard. They all offer pretty much the same thing. A nice, clean room, moderate gambling rates, a couple of nice restaurants, a pool for the wife to lay out at (I’m so painfully white that prolonged exposure to the sun either requires an immense amount of sunscreen or makes me look like an idiot. Also, the image of me with my shirt off is gross to say the least). Bottom line is the hotels on the strip are all the same. They cater well to their guests and offer competitive deals and amenities.

College football is the same way. If the wife and I were top rank linebackers (yes, I just insinuated that the wife was a linebacker…it’s okay, I once passively agreed when she said she thought she could stand to lose some weight—if I made it through that, I can make it through this) we could choose between any number of Division I schools. They all offer (legitimately) the same thing.

50 years ago this wasn’t case. There were a handful, or less than that, of programs that could provide you both winning and exposure.  Schools like Notre Dame, USC, Ohio State, Michigan and Alabama could provide hopeful recruits the chance to be seen by scouts and even appear on television. But everything changed in the last 20 years.

Back to Vegas.

With so much being so equal between the different hotels and casinos, the wife and myself love us some Ballys. Our main reason? Location, location, location. It’s in the heart of the strip, right in the middle of everything. Flanked by Paris and the Flamingo and adjacent to Caesar’s palace and the Bellagio, it makes perfect sense for us.

Back to our budding careers as middle linebackers.

Was it ESPN’s coverage, ad nauseum, that created the national obsession with college football, or was it our national obsession with college football that created the endless coverage? Answer is a little of both. Our need for information lead us to ESPN, the network that is the great market for college football and gives us so much of it that we are engulfed by it. (I single out ESPN, but there are plenty of sites and stations who help feed the beast; ESPN is just the most obvious).

Still, the constant need for information made it so that we can go anywhere and gain the exposure we wanted. These days, winning is secondary for the high school star with real pro aspirations. So, how does one choose where to go to school now? A number of factors: location, family, illegal incentives and which programs are poised to win now. While this is great for the college athlete, it’s diluted the product by creating parody.

Parady is good in most sports (to a certain extent). You need a Goliath, but not one so dominate that they can’t be taken down. Parody works in the NFL really well. In the NBA, as long as your marquee cities are productive, the parody between the rest of the bottom feeders creates compelling storylines. All these things are beneficial to the playoff system. Eight seeds can beat one seeds, worst to first can happen over a season. When everyone has at least an outside chance (or almost everyone), then we can all feel good.

The problem with college football is there is parody, but it doesn’t suit the current format of college football. The BCS made sense 50 years ago. When teams rose to the top there was little question of their status. Notre Dame and Michigan could have played in 10 different BCS title games and we could have thanked college football for not making us go through the agony of a playoff system to determine that these two teams were above and beyond. Why would we want to go through the playoff system when half the country’s top recruits were going to those schools anyway?

These days the field is diluted, and it muddles the landscape of college football. We have a bowl system that does not best serve the parody our interest in college football has created. ESPN seems to blindly support a system that thumbs its nose at the kind of competitive evenness that ESPN has helped to provide to some degree.

We complain about the BCS system, but are partially to blame for making it outdated. Our national obsession with football has made the regular season compelling, but we have paid the price for it. The BCS model isn’t wrong, it just doesn’t fit the sport any longer. It came along 50 years too late.

Let’s not say the same thing about the playoff system.