Obama Wants Playoffs

Absent blowing this atrocity up and going with a 16-team playoff, if the BCS wanted a better system to choose the teams for their antiquated bowl games, they would go with a NCAA men’s basketball tournament-style committee.

That’s a group of about 10 people who spend the season scouting teams, meeting to discuss various scenarios and then eventually getting together to go through a vast checklist of predetermined criteria to select the field.

While not devoid of controversy, it’s orderly and transparent.

That would require courage and accountability though, actual faces to answer for the decision to select team X over team Y. The current system allows the blame to be spread out, even to faceless machines.

While a couple dozen conference commissioners and bowl executives sure do love to count the money, they don’t want to claim ownership of the BCS. In fact, Mountain West Conference attorneys claim that there’s no proof the BCS exists as a legal entity. Six conference commissioners take turns serving as “BCS coordinator” for a two-year term. Then they eagerly pass it off, like it’s a disease.

In the meantime, a nonsense system rolls on. Don’t be shocked by the controversy, the foolishness or the corruption.

That isn’t a flaw in the system. It is the system.

http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/football/news?slug=dw-bcs092909

Major college football already has the most unlevel playing field of any nationally relevant sport. It openly allows a cartel of six conferences to hoard most of the bowl money, leaving crumbs for the TCUs of the world and pretending that computers/pollsters are a legitimate method to determine a national champion.

That’s bad enough, but what’s just as infuriating is how these polls – especially USA Today (coaches) – and BCS computers that impact who plays for the national title are driven more by herd-mentality thinking. There’s not enough credence given to a team’s overall body of work or strength of schedule.

If Penn State and California go 12-0 and are the only unbeaten teams, they’ll likely play for the national title. Yet both might face no more than one ranked team the entire year. But LSU could go 12-1 and play six ranked teams but get locked out of Pasadena for having too many land mines on its schedule.

And we wonder why there’s an outcry for a playoff system.

http://jacksonville.com/sports/columnists/gene_frenette/2009-09-24/story/college_football_poll_system_nothing_but_a_sham

Sporting News: What’s your response to those who say that, if a change is forced upon the BCS by politicians, the current system will simply die and we’ll go back to the even more flawed system we had prior to the BCS, with no No. 1 vs. No. 2 matchup?

Karl Benson: It’s a fair assessment. If that did happen, the argument is that Boise State isn’t playing Oklahoma and Utah isn’t playing Alabama in those big games. That is one of the risks that we face if indeed we’re gonna challenge the current system from the legal standpoint and the political standpoint.

Following the 1996 season, when BYU was a member of the WAC and got left out of the Fiesta Bowl, we were making the same arguments then as the Mountain West made in 2009. We went to the Senate in 1997 about it. That led to the first alteration of the BCS that did provide greater access to the non-qualifiers. …

We’re always going to want greater access and more of the revenue. The founding six members don’t want to give up access and don’t want to give up more money. That’s understandable. If (Mountain West commissioner) Craig Thompson or I were in the group of six, more than likely we’re going to be agreeing with their position. And if (Big Ten commissioner) Jim Delany was the commissioner of the Western Athletic Conference or the Mountain West Conference, he would be on this side of it.

SANDY — As we get deeper into the college football season, non-BCS teams continue to break though the top 10, but the question remains: Will a non-BCS team ever get a shot at playing for a national title? One Utah restaurant owner is making it his personal goal to make sure non-BCS teams have a chance.

When John Larson is not busy taking orders, making sandwiches, or serving soup at Oliva’s Cafe in Sandy, he’s running a national campaign to change college football.

He’s the creator and operator of startaplayoff.com, a website that has generated so much buzz in the last three weeks that it’s getting national attention.

http://www.ksl.com/?nid=635&sid=7966409

Some people have said the Mountain West Conference is deserving of an automatic BCS bid instead of the Big East. Are you concerned at all that the Big East could lose its automatic bid over the four-year period the BCS uses to measure automatic status?
“I feel comfortable that we’re secure in where we are in every standpoint for the next five years. so from that standpoint, we’re solid. Looking on beyond the next five years, I don’t know if there’s going to be a BCS, frankly. That’s more important.”

How would there be no BCS? Because of the push by some in Congress for a playoff?
“Right. You see what’s going on with Congress in regards to the playoffs, and you know how the schools and conferences across the country feel relative to that issue. At some point or another, I think people are going to be going back to the old system.”

By the old system, you mean the alliances between conferences for upper-level bowl games and the lack of a guaranteed 1 vs. 2 championship game, right?
“Yes. The BCS was really instituted as an attempt to get away from all that and create a 1-2 championship game. It may not be perfect. I think we all acknowledge it’s not perfect. But we all felt it was better than what was before. But with the issue of a playoff — and I know there’s some appeal to a large segment out there — to the people at the schools, they’re not supportive of that. If there are two choices on the table (playoffs or old system), I think they’ll go back to the old system.”

The American Football Coaches Association plans to no longer reveal the final ballots of the coaches’ poll starting in 2010. Is the lack of transparency a concern to you and other BCS commissioners?
“We’ve talked about it at every meeting. We’d like to have the people accountable and have the votes public. I shouldn’t say we. I’ll speak for myself. I would support the issue of transparency, and I would like to see the poll public. I understand the rationale of keeping it confidential. You don’t want people feeling like they have to do certain things and they could be compromised. I like the KISS method: Keep It Simple Stupid. I’m not smart. I like to keep things as simple as I can. I know that sounds counterintuitive to the BCS.”

In your mind, is a non-transparent coaches poll a deal-breaker for the BCS? Would that be the end of the coaches’ poll as part of the BCS formula?
“I don’t know. I know how we feel. I know they know how we feel. I know we’ll have some discussions in some point before the next cycle. Whether or not it becomes a quote unquote defining issue, I’m just not equipped or able to answer that.”

http://blog.al.com/solomon/2009/09/qa_with_big_east_commissioner.html

The BCS’s emphasis on secret, complicated computer rankings prompted a Georgia Tech student and two of his math professors to suggest that monkeys could rank teams about as well as the BCS does.

In 2004, Thomas Callaghan, Dr. Peter Mucha (who’s now teaching at the University of North Carolina), and Dr. Mason Porter wrote a paper showing that a theoretical monkey (in reality, it’s a computer choosing outcomes at random) could rank teams by simply casting a vote for the team he thought was the best.

Each monkey got a single vote for the entire season. The two teams with the most votes would be picked for the national championship.

In the study, the monkey tended to abandon his favorite team as soon as it lost a game and constantly switched teams.

After a while, certain teams were getting all the monkeys’ votes: the teams that tended to win most of their games and that beat other good teams. That is, the monkeys’ votes yield a pretty good ranking of teams.

The monkey method gives a great deal of weight to the idea that “my team beat your team, so my team should have a higher ranking” — a concept that the BCS computers snubbed when it came to Colorado and Nebraska in 2001.

The monkey study’s purpose is to show that even someone who considers only who won and who lost – and sometimes makes irrational choices — can still yield a pretty good ranking of football teams.

By the way, if you’re interested in charting the performance of the monkeys once the BCS rankings come out, you can check out Dr. Mucha’s blog at rankings.amath.unc.edu/

http://www.newsobserver.com/sports/story/1686878.html

Like everyone else who’s experienced it, the senior senator from Utah couldn’t help but marvel at the huge video board hanging from the Cowboys Stadium roof. He could see blades of artificial grass and beads of sweat rolling down players’ faces.

“Really, really unbelievable,” he said. “Amazing.”

Even less believable was the final score glowing on that board last Saturday: BYU 14, Oklahoma 13. And as long as we’re talking picture clarity, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) had one more thought:

“If this doesn’t make my case against the BCS, I don’t know what does.”

The reason college football does not have a playoff is that most of the people responsible for administering the sport do not want one. I include in this group college presidents, conference commissioners, athletic directors and coaches. It is not a unanimous view, by any means of measurement, but I believe a significant majority opposes a playoff because of a number of specific factors.

In my view, the attitudes of college administrators in opposition to a playoff are sincere, and they have strong belief in their positions. They can do nothing about the fact that bandwagon-jumping legislators somehow believe that the determination of college football’s national champion ought to be grist for their political mill. They understand that some among the fan base and the news media want what they want, and they want it now.

Take my word, it’s not going to happen anytime soon.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/06/sports/football/06bcs.html?_r=1

College football coaches want a playoff and prefer a plus-one. However, many don’t think schools from non-BCS conferences should get greater access to those bowls.

The greatest hot-button issue with fans — playoffs — also is one with coaches. Thirty-two of the coaches who responded want a change. Of those, 16 prefer a Plus-One, in which the top two ranked teams after the four major bowl games would meet in a championship game.

“I like the bowls,” Arkansas’ Bobby Petrino said on Wednesday’s Southeastern conference call. “I like the fact that it’s a long season and — these are student-athletes — they get a break at the end of the season. They get time to study, prepare for finals and be a student, then get prepped for bowl games. The way it’s played out the last eight years, I think a Plus-One is a good idea if you could ever work it out.

“It would end all the controversy.”

One of the closest tallies revolved around schools from the five non-BCS conferences getting greater access to the four rich BCS bowls. Currently, a non-BCS school can qualify only if it finishes in the top 12 of the final rankings or ahead of a BCS conference champion.

Twenty-four coaches who responded said non-BCS conferences should have greater access, and 14 said no. Not surprisingly, non-BCS coaches voted 15-3 for greater access and BCS coaches voted 11-9 against it.

“I coached in the MAC for seven years,” Missouri coach Gary Pinkel said. “Anybody outside the BCS to play week in week out the schedule we do within the BCS and our leagues, that’s something that has to be entertained.”

http://www.denverpost.com/colleges/ci_13265995

“If there is anything that I dislike about the whole system now, and I have always been a bowl guy. I’ve always been a guy that lots of positive reinforcement for a lot of players who get the opportunity to play in a bowl game for their efforts. If there is anything that has created a negative situation in college football, to me, it’s the fact that there is only one thing that matters and that’s who wins the national championship. I don’t think that’s fair to all the other good teams in college football, or all the other players who play in college football.

“It’s a pretty significant accomplishment to win the SEC. It’s a pretty significant accomplishment to win the ACC. So, if there is a down side to our system right now, that’s why I’ve always been kind of for the plus-one thing, where there are at least four teams involved in this. Maybe it wouldn’t be so much that way. Because if you had four teams, there would be one and two losses, would not knock you out of it and a lot more people would be interested and there would be a lot more teams in the end. So now we’re talking about the first game of the season, you’re out of it. It’s horrible. It’s a horrible thought for any team to be out of anything for one game.”

http://alabama.scout.com/2/893835.html