Columnist Dean Juipe: NCAA needs football playoffs

Dean Juipe

Tuesday, Dec. 4, 2001 | 9:58 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or 259-4084.

There are those who will say it's a dead horse, all this wailing about the lack of a legitimate national championship game in college football.

But beating up on the NCAA is an old habit and its assailants generally believe that the system that's currently in place -- the one that relies on those mysterious Bowl Championship Series rankings -- will someday be seen for what it is and be dutifully scrapped.

Perhaps only our children's children will see the day, yet I'm certain there will come a time when playoffs are implemented and a bona fide, no debate, all-questions-resolved national champion is crowned.

That it hasn't happened yet is testament to two factors: A stubborn streak, perhaps in deference to school presidents, by those in command at the NCAA office, and the failure of television -- if we can refer to it as a single entity -- to lay out the particulars and open the key to the vault.

But just as there is a Super Bowl for pro football, college football will eventually comply.

And when it does, the widespread reaction will be "What took so long?"

Look at what has a chance of happening this year, even with the BCS rankings supposedly eliminating obvious and embarrassing glitches. Nebraska, which did not qualify for its own league championship game because it lost to Colorado, could very well find itself in the Jan. 3 Rose Bowl against Miami with the supposed "national championship" at stake.

So Nebraska's not good enough to earn a berth in the Big 12 title game -- which Colorado won over Texas -- yet might play Miami for the national title? That scenario, which seemingly will happen if LSU pulls off a minor upset and beats Tennessee in the SEC title game Saturday, should be the last straw if it actually comes to pass.

This year's situation is convoluted, to be sure, yet not surprising. It's always convoluted.

And the only way to resolve the issue is to do the one thing fans, columnists and barflies have clamored to see for years: Take the bowl games as they're presently constituted -- or at least as many of them as necessary -- and turn them into a playoff system in which winners continue to advance toward a late January title game that can run the day before the Super Bowl.

As part of this arrangement, the NCAA should also scale back each team's limit of regular-season games to 11 instead of going to 12 as it will next year. (Limiting the regular season to 11 games would also pacify those college presidents who object to a playoff system on the basis of athletes missing too many classes. After all, as I present it, more athletes would be available to attend class than will be the case under the rules in 2002.)

As for how many teams should be seen as playoff worthy and the criteria used to determine them, those are negotiable items that can be addressed and perhaps be resolved with a minimum of disagreement.

But rest assured a BYU team that is 12-0, as it is today, would be included in a playoff scenario if there were one. This year, it has been excluded from title consideration.

That's not right. Nor is having Nebraska playing for the national title when it couldn't even qualify for its league championship game.