The Evil BCS runs into Jesse Jackson and the Surge in Iraq
IF the BCS system is actually better than what it replaced, THEN folks shouldn’t get so upset about it.
There is hardly a subject debated with less logic than the BCS-national championship war that occurs annually as the college football season winds down. BCS is short for Bowl Championship Series…..a system designed in the 90s to shift bowl game invitations around to increase the chances of the top two teams playing each other in the same bowl game…thus giving us a “national champion” in football.
I will admit that the systems has its flaws…but the verbal desecration every year directed at the evil BCS everywhere from ESPN anchor chairs to call in radio shows to newspaper columns is outrageously incongruous with the reality. Fans and supposed journalists alike go ballisitic complaining about a system that some undefined “they” should do something about because the system is not perfect. (as opposed to our sterling public school system, something many of these same fans and journalist praise incessently).
And because it’s not perfect, football fans have to live with the unsettling thought that there is not a clear cut national champion…because as we know, the constitution guarantees life, liberty and total clarity of football champions. But assuming that assessing the BCS is a national conversation is actually worth having, let’s at least do it logically. On the idea of “they” doing something about it, I submit:
IF there is no “they”…..THEN they can’t do diddly squat about it.
And there’s your answer….or there is the reason there is no answer. There is no “they” here. Or maybe more accurately, there are a lot of “theys” and their interests do not align. Here’s how a few of the diverse “theys” might think about this:
IF you are chairman of the Rose Bowl and IF you have no idea what other job you could get this cushy and IF it is not in The Rose Bowl’s best interest to go to a pure playoff system and you don’t want to be remembered as the Rose Bowl Chairman that screwed up the Rose Bowl for all time….THEN you are not likely to be very cooperative in developing a play-off system that even runs a small risk of minimizing the Rose Bowl’s status and impact.
Or…..
IF you are athletic director at Duke and your football program loses a ton of money and IF your ACC membership rebate is dependent on nice BCS money coming to the conference and IF that money is needed to run Duke’s athletic program THEN you are not going to be too thrilled about monkeying with the BCS system either (and your football team sure as hell won’t be terribly affected by the nuanced imperfections in the system either…).
Or…
IF you are head coach at Rutgers and IF you realize that by beating UConn or South Florida or Cincinnati in a weak conference you might actually get a BCS Bowl Bid and IF you realize (like the rest of us do) that your team could not go .500 in the Southeastern Conference THEN you are in love with the system just as it is….rather than getting your fannies kicked by, say Tennessee, in the quarter finals of a proposed football tournament.
And on and on it goes….as the current system’s merits positivley effect city councils in the host cities and the conference commissioners in most conferences and the TV networks and cable systems and hotel and restaurant operators in the host cities and so on.
The NCAA (who I assume the ignorant mean when they say “they”) does not control any of these levers (like they do in all other sports, including the smaller divisions in football) and none of these levers really are helped by scrapping the current football format and making a March Madness style tournament. Thus, shock of all shocks, those levers do NOT cooperate to form a “they” that can or will “do anything about it.”
It’s kind of like this:
IF Jesse Jackson has made himself fabulously wealthy and famous by exploiting racial tensions in the nation, THEN we can expect him to never admit when anything is improving in this arena and in fact go around agitating racial tensions whenever he can to raise more money.
(full disclosure dictates I say that Jackson calls it raising “awareness”….however….we think he paid for his last out of wedlock child out of campaign cash…er awareness.)
In other words, people will not act to kill the golden goose from which they get their golden eggs. (and if they’re a liberal “not in it for the money,” then I’ll guaran-dam-tee this!!) Net result? The folks who could change this system will not because it would simply not be in their best interests to do so. But really, how concerned should we be about this?
IF the BCS decended on us from Mars and ruined a perfectly sound existing system, THEN we can bitch about it.
Well, sense the BCS is not alien and has actually improved the chances of a bowl game featuring a clean 1 versus 2 match up…then we should not continue to have to suffer this annual natioanl bitch about it.
I’m not promoting the BCS… but the logically challenged national debate is effective type and shadow for the loss of reason on all of our national debates…and this one tends to be very one sided. And the national debate ignores the obvious…or what would be obvious if logic were still alive and well.
IF the BCS has accomplished the goals it set out to accomplish, THEN it is a success…if not perfect.
The BCS set out to make sure that the top two teams in the nation played each other in the same bowl game. It has mostly done that.
The BCS did NOT promise to solve the imperfections in the polling system. (Well hell, Democrat run counties in Florida can’t do that after many decades of iron fisted controls). And, the BCS has delivered on not solving those inherent problems it never said it would solve.
The BCS wanted to preserve the tradition (much like Jesse Jackson’s awareness…this tradition spends very nicely) that bowl games are an integral part of. The BCS thought it would be OK to preserve the cash infusions also. They are 2 for 2 on that.
So before you get all self righteous about the cash part….and if you are a small or medium market talk show host….we know you’ve already gotten self righteous…consider:
IF college football uniforms, stadiums, playing fields, marching bands, travel arrangements cost a ton of money…THEN it’s ok if athletic departments have a way to raise that money via the BCS system……….and IF softball teams and field hockey teams and gymnastic teams and track teams also take a lot of money…THEN its actually DAMN GOOD that some sport can actually make some of it.
So besides the flaw that we can’t force Halliburton to pay for all of this, I think that about sums up the money angle.
Although I would feel better if I could add...
IF you make your living by sitting in expensive stadium press boxes and eating nice press box buffets and get paid because there is an audience not for you, but for that which you are covering…THEN JUST SHUT THE HELL UP about the money. (now I feel better. That’s not an if/then logical conclusion….its an if/then logical command.)
The way I see it…the BCS has done all it set out to do and all it said it could do. What it has not done is a very good job of self promotion…much like the Bush Administration and the surge in Iraq. Both the BCS and the surge were designed to clean up big messes that, interestingly enough, are NOT the fault of the BCS or the surge. And both have cleaned up a lot. And both still get slammed by illogical commentators, reporters, talk show hosts and callers for not creating utopia in the time it takes, for example, Bill Clinton to get a haircut on the tarmac at LAX. (and while we’re on that subject, the John Edwards campaign really missed a chance to minimize damage related to Johnny’s 1200 dollar haircuts. Afterall, 1200 is a mere pittance compared to the financial damage of shutting down LAX flight patterns for four hours!!!)
But back to football. Sort of. The bottom line as far as the BCS and the death of logic in America is this…..the BCS gets blamed for not being perfect, when it should be praised for taking college football a few steps closer to a better way to decide a national champion than this sport used to have.
I suspect that the BCS as we know it will one day not exist…but history will show it served as as a bridge from the old bowl system….to a more orderly play-off of some sort. But it will take a morphing process. You know, like evolution…..(oh no, that’s a whole other chapter…)…which liberals usually love.