This whole BCS thing is insane. Does anyone understand this analysis? Why in the world doesn’t college football have a playoff tournament?
This whole BCS thing is insane. Does anyone understand this analysis? Why in the world doesn’t college football have a playoff tournament?
brigita
October 28, 2002 — 3:48 pm
i wish The Mister were here to give me the reason for that. i just blindly cheer for the boys in the gold helmets.
speaking of gold helmets, i might have to root for Navy when the Mid-$#!tters face off against the Irish in two weeks. kinda like how i voted for Nader when i was living in Cali—you knew what the results were going to be hours before the polls closed. 🙂
i’ll forward the article to the man—whose dad works as a commissioner for the SEC, BTW, and i’m not talking Securities Exchange Comission)—and let you know what he has to say for hisself. 🙂
galen
October 28, 2002 — 10:30 pm
Basically, the BCS is a meta-analysis of various polls and computer-based rankings. The computer-based rankings use strength of schedule analysis and size of winning to develop their rankings, which normally vary quite a bit from the two major polls, which are based on people, who have prejudices and lack of time to study all the teams’ games before voting.
The best thing for those of us who don’t like the BCS is to see at least 3, and preferably 5 teams unbeaten at the end of the year. There is no playoff because bowl committees [who have a bunch of money to dole out] don’t want one. There should be one, but it would destroy the bowl system now in place, and remove the less-successful teams from the chance to play in a bowl as a reward for a very good year. The current system is good for teams like Bowling Green, who will never be allowed to beat enough good teams to get into the major bowl setup, but will play in quite a few smaller bowls.
Ron
October 29, 2002 — 5:58 am
Sticking with the short answer, there’s no college football playoff system because of the money involved with the corporate sponsors of the bowl games. That and a misguided sense of “tradition” which is basically a lame excuse for greed.
That being said, the most attractive proposals I’ve seen include keeping the current BCS and bowl system in place as quarterfinals — narrowing it down to 4 teams that face off in a real playoff.
Galen has done a good job explaining the rest, except the BCS formula (beginning this year) no longer includes margin of victory. Call it the Steve Spurrier amendment, if you will 😉
BTW: With Penn State suffering it’s third loss, they are out of the BCS picture and there are no other BigTen teams I can get too enthusiastic about, so I’m officially hopping on the Notre Dame bandwagon. Go Irish!!
Kris
October 29, 2002 — 3:53 pm
Jump on, Ron! Plenty of room up here. 🙂
I like the idea of the quarterfinal system. But isn’t it still the case that the non-best teams could end up playing for the title? I mean, if you win a division you’re guaranteed a spot, right? Well, what if one division is much crappier than all the others? Also – isn’t it the case that often the “at large” spots can get awarded to teams with large fan draws (admittedly, like ND) that aren’t necessarily deserving?
I do like that they dropped the “margin of victory”. I think that’s definitely helped ND’s ranking this year. We haven’t really trounced anybody.
This is all just so confusing. I was trying to explain it the Snook the other day and just couldn’t. What other sport gets decided (at least partly) on the basis of a poll of coaches and media types? It’s way too subjective.