Some Things Are NOT the BCS's Fault

No one on earth hates the BCS more than I do, so this is not a post about how the BCS is fine and dandy. It's not. It's a cancer that is causing a huge number of only partly-understood ancillary diseases in college football.

But it is not responsible for all the problems the game has.

It is not responsible for the mess of the Big 12 South this year. That is an unpreventable disaster. Having three very good teams in Texas, Oklahoma, and Texas Tech at the top of the division is a circumstance so unlikely that it couldn't be anticipated, and clearly wasn't. Even if you had a playoff, that still wouldn't solve the problem with deciding the conference championship. What they should do is decide the division champion based on what happened on the field, not what happened in the incredibly stupid Harris Poll. I understand that we have a 1-1 trifecta here. That doesn't bother me. In ten minutes, I could design a system that would decide the division champion based on on-the-field results, without giving anyone incentives to run the score up in a meaningless victory.

That said, the rest of what's going on with this IS the BCS's fault, and there are other travesties, like Utah eliminating Boise State from the BCS (in all likelihood - though that's not a guarantee), and having four undefeated teams with only one getting a chance to play for the title, and so, so many other extremely ridiculous things. All of those things are the fault of the BCS.

I remain insistent that the only way we're going to break this system up is to set up an extra-BCS tournament for those 5 conferences that are not allowed to play the same game as everyone else. Set the tournament up for the top 8 non-BCS teams - the 5 conference champions, plus an extra team from those 3 conferences that have the best out-of-conference records against the BCS conferences (the first year - every year thereafter, you get an extra team in for winning the tourney, one for making the final game, and one for being the team that lost to the tourney champion in the semifinals). Keep running that tournament until you get a deal that makes you BCS money. Every year, offer to play another game the first weekend in January against the BCS "champion" to decide the tre #1 team in the nation.

Barring this, there will always be a BCS. To our shame.