0
0
By Mike Meraz
By Mike Meraz
The BCS should stand for the biggest crock in sports. For the second consecutive year, the BCS system has failed to determine a clear cut national title game for the college football championship.
For those of you fortunate enough not to know what the BCS is, allow me to elaborate. The Bowl Championship series is a system implemented in the 1998 season in order to best determine the top two teams in the country to play for a national title, as well as the four other “major” bowls.
The system is based on a series of rankings, from polls of coaches and sportswriters, to rankings determined completely by computers.
The computer rankings are based on things such as overall team record and strength of schedule, among many other things.
However, the BCS system has been surrounded by a cloud of criticism ever since it was implemented.
There has been only one year that the BCS has produced two clear cut teams to play in the championship game, in 2006 when undefeated USC squared off against undefeated Texas.
What about all the other years? It seems that if there aren’t only two dominant teams throughout the season, the BCS is a failure.
Like in 2005 when 5 teams finished the season undefeated, but of course, only two get to play for the championship. In 2004, three dominant teams finished the season with one loss, which caused even more debate.
You wouldn’t even have to look past this season to see the complete wackiness of the BCS. In the last week of the season, both Missouri and West Virginia lost their final games of the season, ranked numbers 1 and 2 respectively.
The outcomes resulted in Ohio State, a team that didn’t even play the final two weeks of the season, backing into the championship game.
Missouri’s lost left them out of the BCS bowls completely, while Kansas jumped over them to take a spot in a coveted BCS bowl. But here’s the kicker, Kansas’ only loss of the season came to Missouri.
Kansas also had one of the easiest schedules in the entire nation, while Missouri had one of the top 25 hardest schedules in the nation.
Even the only undefeated team Hawaii doesn’t have a shot at a title due to their lack of strength of schedule. It doesn’t even matter that hot teams like USC or Georgia have been playing great football the last month of the season; they lost two games in the season, so they’re out.
An age old mantra of sports has been “It’s not how you start, its how you finish”, but apparently this doesn’t apply if you play college football. The nation has been crying for a playoff since the BCS system was implemented, but BCS officials refuse to even consider it.
It’s unfathomable that college football is the only sport in the country that doesn’t have a system that determines a clear champion. I’m not saying that a playoff system is the answer, just the BCS system definitely isn’t.
Regardless of what critics and naysayer’s may think, a national title game will be played on January 7th in New Orleans between the Ohio State Buckeyes and the Louisiana State University Tigers. The term paper champions have never seemed more fitting.
