Las Vegas Sun

March 29, 2024

Columnist Dean Juipe: Upsets take pressure off BCS bigwigs

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at [email protected] or (702) 259-4084.

Tuesday may be Election Day, yet the sporting public has no vote or say when it comes to college football and its antiquated method of determining a national champion.

Fans in every sport except college football see a season end with a legitimate championship game. One team -- and only one team -- is left standing.

But in college football, there frequently is some doubt as to who's the best. It's not uncommon for two or three teams to go undefeated, which clouds if not completely distorts the title picture.

This year had the potential to be the one that would force those who control college football to rethink their reliance on computers and gimmicks when it comes to determining a champion. With eight undefeated teams going into this past Saturday's games, it was possible to envision the year ending with a number of those teams still unbeaten and a good deal of public outrage about the lack of a playoff series and a legitimate championship game.

But then came the carnage of Saturday's games and the number of unbeaten teams was unexpectedly halved from eight to four, which, in essence, takes the publicly despised and entirely misnamed Bowl Championship Series off the hook yet again.

Ask any fan in America if he or she would scrap the BCS and its convoluted formulas and replace them with, say, an eight-team playoff series that would lead to a undisputed national champion, and each and every one would reply with a resounding "Yes!"

But the only way the BCS is going to be scrapped is to have a season where several teams deserve an opportunity to play for the championship, and until the weekend's upsets it looked as if this might be that season. With eight teams sporting perfect records and the season winding down, the pressure to do away with the BCS and implement a playoff series was, at least sentimentally, building.

But that was before Notre Dame, Virginia Tech, Georgia and North Carolina State all lost on the same day, and the playoff argument went down with them for another year as well.

By edict of the BCS -- which school presidents and athletic directors only halfheartedly support -- college football's championship game will be the Jan. 4 Fiesta Bowl. Two teams will be handpicked by a computer to play in the title game, and right now only Miami, Ohio State and Oklahoma are worthy of consideration; Bowling Green is, like the previous three, still undefeated but even its coach has said his team -- with its comparatively easy schedule -- doesn't merit national championship honors.

Fans were hoping for a scenario in which as many teams as possible were still undefeated through the regular season, thereby leading to an outcry to dismantle the BCS and replace it with something meaningful. And the only meaningful solution is to stock the most prestigious bowl games with eight teams in a win-or-be-eliminated playoff series that would ultimately lead to the equivalent of a college football Super Bowl.

It'll happen someday, no doubt about it. A playoff series would be a huge, huge moneymaker, and for that reason alone it'll eventually come to pass.

Likewise, a playoff series would eliminate any and all arguments concerning which team is the best in a given season, doing away with the possibility of split national champions in the process. (Three times in the 1990s alone there were two teams that could claim the national championship in the same year, due to discrepancies in the two major polls.)

This season, until Saturday at least, looked as if it was going to unwind perfectly for those of us who support the notion of a college football playoff series. If, for instance, Miami and Oklahoma were picked by the BCS for the Fiesta Bowl and Notre Dame was 12-0 and Ohio State 13-0, the computer geeks in the BCS tower would have been left cowering.

But it was only so much wishful thinking. Sure, a scenario in which a team such as Miami or Oklahoma or Ohio State could go undefeated and still not play for the mythical championship still exists, but the impact just isn't the same.

The anti-BCS crusade needed a high-profile team such as Notre Dame to play the toughest schedule in the country, win all of its games, yet not make the computer-selected title game. Then and perhaps only then would the shortcomings of the BCS be on full display, thereby creating enough pressure to force change.

But that change won't be coming this year, not after what happened over the weekend.

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