Football Fraud

Oklahoma, Florida, West Virginia, Texas, Rutgers, all top 10 losers. Colorado, Auburn, South Florida, Kansas State, Maryland, the teams that beat them, four of five unranked. Again, please. Explain why the bowl match-ups (and by extension the national champion) should be largely determined by the idiots who vote in these things?

Kirk Herbstreit, on tonight’s USC-Washington broad cast, said, “I’ll vote Oregon No. 5.” Huh? No. 11 loses – albeit to No. 6 Cal – and moves up six places? Is anything further required to prove this whole system is a monumental joke? The fact is we’re five games into a twelve game schedule – almost half way. More games won’t make it good enough to accurately chose the best two, but might help draw a line after the top 16. Will that necessarily be fair to 17? No, it won’t. But perhaps that distinction is less important than between two and three.

What about the whining about “academics,” and “extending the season?” It’s poppycock. Next year the national championship game will played January 7th. That’s six weeks after most teams will have ended their schedules. Lose bowl revenues? Oddly, there are 32 bowls, one more than the number of games required to play down from 32 teams to 1 team. More than one of those 32 is a money losing joke that should be put out of its misery. That playoff would only take five weeks. From sixteen teams to a champion is only four weeks.

Number of games? Teams with bowl games (that’s currently 64, more than half of the 119 Division 1-A football schools) play at least 13 already. Those with a conference championship game play 14. Cut two off the schedule (and that extra conference game), and dump the games with the Little Sisters of the Poor U. Then send the top sixteen to a playoff using the best fifteen bowls and match-up the next thirty-four teams in a “bowl season” during December using the seventeen remaining bowls. Those teams – plus the eight losers in the first playoff round – get 11 games, just as was the case before an extra game was added just last year.

Eight first round winners will play 12 games, four semi-finalists 13, and only the participants in the national championship game will play as long a the current bowl season and play more games – just one more – than most of the 64 bowl teams do now.

In fact, a sixteen team playoff takes less games and is a shorter season than is played now. So is a 32 team playoff.

It’s easy, and all the excuses to the contrary, it’s the only sensible, fair, and rational thing to do. Which means it will never happen.