It’s Time for a Change in the College Football Postseason

Finally, somebody intelligent and with a little bit of power calling out college football and their ridiculous BCS bowl games. All it took was new President-elect Barack Obama to mention the words "college football" and "playoff" in the same breath to get the palms of BCS coordinator John Swofford to start sweating. And I thought bringing down the GOP was impressive.

Obviously, setting up a playoff format for college football is not one of his top priorities as President in this economic disaster. It's not even in the same stratosphere as the other issues he has on his docket. 

Now, having said that, thank you, Mr. President, for pointing out what every college football fan, reporter, and mascot knows. The BCS is a sham.

The irony of the situation is that nobody directly affected by the BCS is at liberty to say anything because it is the BCS that puts money in their pockets. It affects the fans of college football and cheats them out of a great month of the highest level of college football with the best teams in the country squaring off.

Coaches, no matter how they feel about the system are getting paid a lot of money to keep their traps shut. So we never get to hear what the coaches think about the system. They do a lot of coach speak, “It’s the system we have, and we just have to work with it.” As they cash their outrageous paychecks they receive from institutes of higher learning.

Nobody can tell me watching an eight- or 12-team playoff race throughout the month of December, with the championship game culminating on Jan. 1, wouldn’t be a college football nut’s dream. Wouldn’t that be at tad more exciting than watching a gluttony of meaningless bowl games and tuning into the BCS bowl games wondering who really is the best team in the country, and how long has it been really been since they last played a game?

Obama theorized:

"If you've got a bunch of teams who play throughout the season, and many of them have one loss or two losses, there's no clear decisive winner. We should be creating a playoff system," he told reporter Steve Kroft.

After Obama said he will use his influence to create such a system, John Swofford, the BCS coordinator and rest of his powers that be, stayed up all night to think of a response and today released a prepared statement:

"For now, our constituencies—and I know he understands constituencies—have settled on the current BCS system, which the majority believe is the best system yet to determine a national champion while also maintaining the college football regular season as the best and most meaningful in sports."

I love the wink, wink, he pulls off at the beginning of the statement talking about constituents. I don’t know who Swofford thinks he is talking to but, as one newspaper said today, “Obama is CEO of the Earth.”

No sport should ever be allowed to have co-national championships. It doesn’t make sense and is an injustice to everyone that follows the game. It took decades for them to find a way to put the two best teams into a championship game. Now we have to use computers and numbers to find out who the two best teams even are.

Everyone knows Ohio State has not been one of the two best teams in college football heading into the championship game, but a computer’s mathematical formula says it true.

So what are we going to do? We must listen to the computers.

At least in college basketball, they allow human beings to determine the outcome of the postseason. And allow some rational thinking and discretion.

I’m not saying it will happen anytime soon, but with the statement Obama made last night it is going to happen a lot sooner than the folks at the BCS would like. And if I were them I’d start making plans to come up with some sort or playoff because, as Hillary Clinton and John McCain can attest to, “It’s time for a change!”