Time To Change The BCS

After the lowest rated BCS National Championship in history, it has become glaringly obvious that a change in the system is needed to determine the champion of college football.

I understand it’s hard to make an argument that Alabama didn’t deserve to be in the game. Their only loss of the season was to #1 LSU by a field goal in overtime. Every other 1-loss team had a more damaging loss such as, Oklahoma State to unranked Iowa State, Stanford to #10 Oregon, and Boise St. to unranked (at the time) TCU. The numbers were clearly in favor of the Crimson Tide, which is the problem – numbers, polls, and computers are determining who plays for the title.

What if Boise State could recruit a kicker, and Oklahoma State didn’t flop at Iowa State? There would have been three undefeated teams along with LSU. Who gets to play for the championship? Someone will always be left out in the current system.

A sport that puts so much emphasis on its regular season, saying every week matters, looks extremely hypocritical right now. LSU had a perfect regular season, won its conference championship, and was rewarded by playing a team they had already beaten during the regular season in Alabama, who didn’t qualify for the conference championship, yet somehow gets the same reward.

It’s time for change so here is my proposal. An 8-team playoff consisting of 5 conference champions, and 3 at-large bids, with the at-large bids being the highest ranked non-conference champions. Conferences that get auto bids are ACC, Big 12, Big East, SEC, and Pac-12. This way it would put much more emphasis on the regular season, and winning your conference championship. If you can’t win your own conference, you don’t belong in the mix for the national championship.

There would be one bye week, and then the playoff would start the following week. As a result, we could enjoy meaningful bowl games instead of the pointless bowl games we are subjected to now. I’m not saying get rid of the little bowls all together, let the little guys have their moment, but play big bowl games at the same time.

And finally, get rid of the computers and the coach’s poll to rank the teams. Appoint an un-biased committee that can rank the teams like basketball has with the Tournament Committee, or at the very least use the AP poll. As we saw from recent events some coaches aren’t capable of ranking teams fairly (Nick Saban ranked Oklahoma St. 4^th on his ballot, they also happened to be the team rivaling his Crimson Tide for a Championship bid…He didn’t do it by accident).

I admit, this still would not be a perfect system, but it’s far better than what is in place right now. If change doesn’t happen soon, College Football fans will dwindle and begin to not care…just look at the TV ratings from LSU-Bama.

There are a million ways to tweak the system, what’s your take? Comment with how you would want to determine the champion of College Football, or send me your ideas at batkinson42@gmail.com