Wednesday, April 12, 2006
In Defense of the BCS
March Madness has come and gone and, by any measure, this was one of the more exciting NCAA men's basketball championships in some time. Florida, led by the scintillating Joakim Noah, won it all. Just as historic as the Gators' title run was George Mason University slipping on the glass slipper and becoming the smallest school to make the Final Four in the post-Bird/Magic era of the NCAA tournament.
With this past year's Rose Bowl being the exception, the last few years have brought constant criticism to the way college football decides its national champion. The BCS is ridiculed as being outdated, inefficient, and more beneficial to the television networks covering college football than to the schools playing it. Many pundits point to the excitement of March Madness, and a say a postseason tournament is the only way to properly crown a Division I-A football champion. These pundits say that it is a system that is both fairer and more telegenic than the current BCS system.
As enjoyable as March Madness is, however, the BCS provides the opportunity for both a more exciting and more just crowning of a national champion.
Both college basketball fans and opponents of the BCS point to the annual buzzer-beaters and Cinderella stories that come from the basketball tournament each March as proof that football needs a playoff. What bears repeating, however, is that every week of the college football season is a like a round of a single-elimination tournament for the national championship.
Megagames like Miami/Florida State and Texas/Oklahoma mean so much because these rivals have the opportunity to destroy the title hopes of their opponents. As big a basketball rivalry as Duke and North Carolina is, the Tar Heels could get blown out by 20 points by the Blue Devils twice in the regular season, and once in the ACC tournament, and still go on to win a national championship. I enjoy the atmosphere of Duke/UNC as much as the next guy, but it pales in comparison to the atmosphere at the Iron Bowl when either Alabama or Auburn is in the national title hunt.
The de facto playoff nature of college football's regular season also allows for the huge upsets that many feel make March Madness what it is. As great as Bryce Drew's famous three-pointer was, is it really that much more exciting than the three-pointer that Boston College used to beat Notre Dame in 1993? And the fact that Doug Flutie's Hail Mary against the defending national champion Miami Hurricanes did not come in a formal playoff does not make it any less exciting than Lorenzo Charles' dunk that gave Jimmy Valvano his national title?
While the BCS makes every week of college football a playoff and allows its sport to provide year-long excitement that is usually only found in college hoops in March, it is also a much more fair way of determining a national champion. While, in years unlike 2005, there might be some dispute over which two teams played in the BCS title game, there was never any doubt that the two title contenders had displayed the excellence of one of the top two or three teams in the nation over the course of the entire season.
If Florida's basketball team had not won the SEC title, they probably would not have been recognized as a No. 4 seed, which would have meant there were at least 16 schools that had had better seasons than the Gators. Yet, the manner in which college basketball decides its national champion allows for a hot Florida team to win it all.
Furthermore, whereas George Mason's win over Connecticut was probably the most exciting moment of the college basketball season, how fair is it that GMU advances further in the college basketball championship format than UConn after the schools' respective seasons? And to those who say the BCS could never be more fair than a playoff tournament because teams like the 2004 Auburn Tigers are not even allowed to play for a national championship, the question I pose to them is this: how fair did Hofstra think the NCAA tournament process was while they were watching a GMU team who they beat twice, and had superior power ranking to, advance to the Final Four?
As much as this writer loved this year's edition of March Madness (as I do usually every year), it also reminded me how much I love the season-long atmosphere that the BCS creates for college football. While college hoops has three great weeks in March, college pigskin has four great months every autumn.