Something's gotta give
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by user Pack Mentality
This was originally going to be a comment on Douglasvgibbs's opinion piece on the need for a college football playoff system - but I soon realized that I had to make it a full-fledged piece in itself to do the topic justice.
Let's face it: The so-called Bowl Championship Series, in whatever form it may take, is just an elaborate, glorified hoax whose sole purpose is to keep up the illusion of a respectable national championship regime working within the existing bowl system. In reality, it's more like putting a chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous in the back room of a liquor store.
Traditionalists (not to mention The Powers That Be who don't want anything to threaten their sacred cash cow) worry that a playoff system to crown an official NCAA Division I-A national champion would kill the decades-old tradition of the bowl games. They're probably right. After all, just look what introducing a mere two-team, one-game unofficial national championship game has done to that tradition!
Before the BCS and other previous attempts to create an on-field "national championship" matchup, there were only a handful of bowl games, and they were truly events for the teams who played in them and the cities who hosted them. Having the opportunity to play in one was an honor reserved for the very best teams, the culmination of a great season. Nowadays, for the very best teams, even the Rose, Fiesta, Sugar and Orange Bowls can't help but feel at least a little like college football's version of the NIT - a mere consolation prize, something to be "settled for" when you fall short of a spot in the BCS Championship Game. Sure, teams that are a notch or two below the "best of the best" still obviously covet berths in what have become the B-list bowls - but if they too fall short, guess what? As long as they finish at or above .500, they now have any number of C-, D- and E-list bowl games to fall back upon. Would the bowl landscape have become so crowded, so full of mediocre teams that really have no business playing in a bowl game, if bowl games were still thought of as the true pinnacle of college football, rather than just a bunch of glorified exhibition games for teams who couldn't make it into The One Big Game That Really Matters(TM)? Somehow I think not.
My point is this: By now it should be abundantly clear that the bowl games simply cannot peacefully coexist with a national college football championship system. Note that I didn't say "with the BCS" or "with a playoff system." Any regime designed to determine a national champion on the field - even unofficially, as the BCS does - is by nature bound to interfere with and cheapen the bowl games. So, I say it's time for the sport to go all the way, one way or the other: Either establish a playoff system, do away with the bowls (or at least permanently relegate the lot of them to NIT status) and be done with it, or keep the bowls and abandon not just the BCS, but the whole idea of even a mythical national championship game. The end-of-season polls, imperfect as they are, would once more have to suffice. Instead of getting ready to play Florida, Ohio State would already have played their bowl game: the Rose Bowl against USC. That's right - the Rose Bowl game would have actually featured the Big 10 champion against the Pac 10 champion. What a concept!
