• Football fever. Thursday’s BCS football championship kicked 30.8 million viewers to ABC, the highest-rated college title game since 2006. NBC‘s NFL wild-card playoff claimed 32.1 million Saturday.
http://www.usatoday.com/life/television/news/2010-01-14-nielchatter14_ST_N.htm
In the past, if one of the Rose Bowl’s traditional opponents, the Pacific 10 Conference and Big Ten champions, was selected for the national championship game, officials could take the conference’s second-place team.
That’s what happened when Ohio State played for the title in 2008 and Illinois came west to face USC.
Starting with the 2011 game, the Rose Bowl must fill the empty slot with a non-BCS team if that team is ranked No. 12 or higher.
So, in 2008, it might have been Hawaii facing the Trojans on New Year’s Day.
But once the Rose Bowl takes one non-BCS team, it has fulfilled its obligation and can revert to the old rules until the current contract expires in 2014.
http://www.latimes.com/sports/la-sp-rose-bowl28-2009jul28,0,7041039.story
Concerned in part with continuing attacks on the Bowl Championship Series, BCS officials successfully lobbied the American Football Coaches Association to delay a controversial change in the coaches poll by a year, CBSSports.com has learned.
The AFCA raised eyebrows on May 27 by announcing that its 16-member board of trustees voted unanimously to once again hide the final ballots of its 62 voting coaches starting in 2010. The AFCA has made those ballots public the previous four years.
The return to a lack of transparency upset BCS officials more than what was originally known. There are indications that the change could be a deal breaker, going forward, in the coaches poll’s inclusion in the BCS. The poll is one of two human components in the BCS. The Harris poll is the other. There are also six computer indexes that are factored in.
And now, a few words for Senator Orrin Hatch.
Please. Don’t help.
If you have been one of the few people listening to Senator Hatch lately, you know that college BCS system just sours his milk. Yeah, yeah. Get in line. Most of us hate the BCS. Most of us have hated the BCS for years. Also, we hate bad trades, stupid contracts and the rising price of tickets at our stadiums. But none of those are going to be stopped by a harumphing senator trying to sound like the people’s champion, either.
Look, you can get a better argument against the BCS — and a basket of wings — in any sports bar in any city in America, which evidently means there are a LOT of potential senators there at Happy Hour. As electing champions goes, the BCS barely beats the tossing of a dart toward the NCAA conference standings.
It’s been said before: If the BCS is such a grand idea, why doesn’t the NCAA use it for all of its sports? Why doesn’t the NFL? The NBA? The NHL?
Because it’s bone stupid, that’s why. But it also manages to keep the big money in the hands of the big conference. And guess what? Every now and then, it gives a senator a chance to use his deep, concerned voice.
The truth is, a playoff would be less–not more–likely to produce a matchup of the two best teams on the field, would compromise the uniquely rich slice of Americana that is the college football bowl games, and would diminish the most dramatic regular season in all of sports.
The BCS preserves all of this, while ensuring that half of the bowl teams go out as winners. Furthermore, it gave unsung Utah the chance to play, and beat, an excellent Alabama team in the Sugar Bowl.
President-elect Obama seemingly doesn’t realize how unlikely that opportunity would have been in the pre-BCS days. In the 30 seasons prior to the BCS’s inception, what we now call “non-BCS-conference teams” didn’t play in a single major bowl game–not one. Since the 2005 bowl season, they have played in four–and won three.
In truth, the president-elect probably didn’t see too much college football this fall, being somewhat busy with other things. The guess here is that he likely spent about as much time sharing his thoughts about how to reform college football as he spent watching games.
If so, he missed a great show. College football is alive and well, and more popular than ever–largely because of the Bowl Championship Series and the title game it provides, the bowl games it preserves, and, most of all, the meaningful regular season it produces.
The change we need is to stop bashing the BCS and start recognizing what a great thing it is for college football.
Jeffrey H. Anderson (with Chris Hester) created one of the six computer rankings used in determining which college football teams will play in the National Championship Game.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/023iifqy.asp?pg=1
Congratulations to the Gators for winning the national championship, but I can’t help but wonder how they would have looked against USC … or Texas … or Utah. It was a great game, but I would have loved to see three games like this, or seven games, or more … College football needs a playoff. Obama knows it. Everyone knows it. And that’s why I am starting this blog tonight.
