The Game(s) that Shouldn't be Played

Today Alabama plays Florida. I’ll be watching, but it will be the game that shouldn't be played. Nor should Texas and Nebraska play head-to-head with the elimination from consideration for a national championship on the line.

Doing so in either of those cases is analogous to pairing Duke and North Carolina in an ACC basketball championship game, then baring the loser from March Madness. That approach would kill the NCAA basketball tourney and likely lead to its replacement by a bewildering patchwork of meaningless invitational games, just as we have in football.

Yes, the Bowl season is nearly upon us again, and I find myself disinterested in most of them. I assume I’m not alone in that; a clash between the Big Ten and Big 12 sixth place teams can’t possibly be of anything other than local interest, can it?

If Texas plays Florida – or Alabama – for the more-mythical-than-ever national title, the BCS apologist will claim it validated the whole sorry put-up show because the two best teams played in the one big game. But that’s the point to me – it’s just one big game with all the other games irrelevant, even the other exalted BCS bowls. In the meantime the anticipation of that matchup – if it happens – is already being undermined by more than one article making the SEC championship game between the Gators and the Tide the real national championship game.

It should be clear that we needed to freeze it right here – before this weekend, before any of those “conference championships” the ones that exist for the same reason the bowls do and no other – money. This past weekend a year from now needs to be when regular season football stops by mandate. No conference championships, no cheap, boring bowls between team no one wants to see in placed few would otherwise want to go.

This is the point where we freeze the BCS standings, seed the top 32 and play 31 games over five weeks to determine a national champion. Everybody knows all the arguments about academics and such are nonsense; Division II is starting its “December Madness” right now. Are we to believe that St. Olaf is less concerned about academics than Miami (the football factory in Florida, not the institution of higher learning in Ohio)?

I counted 34 bowl games in the list on CBS Sports’ web site. Certainly three of those are losers enough (or unnecessary duplications, like the Insight bowl in the Phoenix metro, with the Fiesta just days later).

The elimination of conference championship games will shorten the season by one week, leaving lots of time for a five-round playoff. There are nearly seven weeks between the last of the Big Ten games on November 21, the weekend before Thanksgiving. That’s plenty of time to play five rounds.

Concerned about too many games? Most teams will play no more games than they do now. If you’re concerned about such things, drop one in the regular season. Eleven is quite enough, isn’t it? In that case, the national champion and runner-up would each play 16 games. Florida – and Alabama – will play 14 games this year. Could the Gators have skipped that game against Charleston Southern – the football equivalent of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre? Make it ten regular season games. Florida doesn’t really have to be the principal in a public square execution of Florida International, do they?” The combined scores of those two games? Florida 126, Road Kill 6. That’s so ridiculous, you’d be accused of making it up if it hadn’t actually happened. All the way to a national championship, then, it's a fifteen game season, just one more than 68 bowl teams will play this season.

The other advantage is that 36 of those 68 teams will end their seasons at ten and return to their studies, something they are (hopefully) better at than playing football.

That’s the way it is, on the verge of another bowl season. Now it’s just about time to settle in for that “can’t miss” game. The Gators and the Elephants in the SEC Championship. This fan will be watching, and consoling himself with the memory of the Rodent’s ass-kicking of the Tide at the Music City Bowl, and the fun Jeannie and I had in Nashville’s downtown honky tonks.