If you, dear reader, happen to be a college football fan, there's an overwhelming chance you're already in complete and total disagreement with the title of this column. If you're a college football diehard, there's a good chance you're cursing my name, calling me a fool, vowing never to read another word I write and setting off to burn your copy of the Daily. You'd be hard-pressed to find another public entity so widely loathed among those who are familiar with it (Congress and Sarah Palin are probably the only two that come close).
For those who are unfamiliar with college football, the BCS stands for the Bowl Championship Series, and refers to the system used to pit the two best regular season teams against each other in a national championship. This alone makes college football unique among major American sports, both professional and collegiate, which have playoffs lasting at least three rounds.
The college football powers-that-be — commissioners of the six major conferences — have, instead of utilizing playoffs, the seemingly elegant and obvious solution to determine the matter of championhood, devised a seemingly inane system consisting of two human polls — but not the most popular and best poll, the AP — which have managed to escape broad public understanding for the better part of a decade.
The system has been altered numerous times to correct perceived injustices, and still manages to generate a firestorm of controversy every fall. As I mentioned earlier, most intelligent college football fans think the system is an absolutely inscrutable travesty that should be scrapped altogether, or at the very least integrated into a four-, eight- or 16-team playoff.
My opinion on the BCS has gone back and forth over the years. For years, I was a BCS apologist, echoing the party line that the bowl system is unique to college football and should be preserved, and that the BCS emphasizes the importance of performance throughout the regular season, rather than getting hot at the right time. I flipped my position a couple of years ago, realizing that conventional logic is overwhelmingly on the side of those advocating for a playoff. And yes, I still recognize that a playoff is very likely the more logical way to determine a champion.
And that's exactly why I'm back on the BCS bandwagon. The apparent silliness of it is really its brilliance. Why not embrace an absurd formula that few understand in order to a crown a champion? Truthfully, the idea of the champion, while the main reason why we watch and care about sports, is also more slippery than we'd like to admit. At best, all a "fair" playoff system accomplishes is telling us who is playing the best at that particular point in the season. Leagues play a whole season, ranging from three to seven months, only to let the matter of who is "best" be determined by what happens in the last month of the season. When you stop and think about it, it makes no more sense than the reviled BCS.
And so let's embrace some uniqueness in our sports viewing habits. Let's stop clamoring for another four-, eight-, 16-, 32-, 64-, 128- or 256-team playoff, and appreciate the obvious value of having things called "Jeff Sagarin's ELO-Chess" and the "Colley Matrix" in our lives. Let's recognize that all playoff systems are inherently arbitrary in some way. But most of all, let's keep arguing about it, because that's where all the fun is.
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Ethan Frigon is a senior majoring in economics. He can be reached at Ethan.Frigon@tufts.edu.
