If you’re like me (and who isn’t?), you’ve been distracted today, and not very productive. (Well, that’s me every day, but I digress.)
Instead, you’ve been counting down the minutes to 5:15 PM (PST) tonight, when the BCS college football championship game will begin — on Fox, check your local listings. (There’s a Hollywood reference for you, thereby justifying a college football post on a Hollywood blog.)
As of this writing I don’t know who’s going to win (*cough* Florida *cough*). While I’m going to watch the game, I’m not as excited about it as I should be.
Partly that’s because I don’t really care for either Florida or Oklahoma. (I’m rooting for them both to lose.) But also because there are a bunch of other teams that equally deserve to play in the championship.
Off the top of my head, here are this year’s major one-loss teams, prior to the bowl season: Alabama, USC, Penn State, Texas, Texas Tech, Florida, and Oklahoma. And don’t forget Utah and Boise State, which both finished the season undefeated.
All of them (well, maybe not Boise State) deserved a shot at the national title. And guess what? In a playoff system, they would.
College basketball does it. Baseball does it. Hell, even water polo does it. So why don’t we have a college football playoff?
We actually do. Three of the four major college football divisions (Division III, Division II, and the division formerly known as IAA) hold playoffs
Only the most important division of all, the so-called BCS, is holding out, clinging to the antiquated bowl system like Norma Desmond refusing to give up on her acting career. (Another Hollywood reference, yay!)
Bowl TV ratings this year are down and have been declining for some time, which I think reflects the general frustration of the college football fan
Like William Holden in “Sunset Boulevard,” you want to grab the NCAA by its faded dressing gown and shout, “Wake up! The bowl audience left years ago.”
The Orange Bowl, for instance, pitted the ACC champion, 9-4 Virginia Tech, against 11-2 Cincinnati, the Big East’s title holder. Not surprisingly, the lackluster matchup scored the Orange Bowl’s lowest ratings since the BCS’s inception.
But imagine the ratings if that game was part of a playoff, with the winner going on to compete in the next round? Heck, imagine the ratings for all the playoff games. They’d make March Madness look like a minor neurosis.
The BCS was created to end the fiery debates that followed every season without a clear-cut victor. But by putting all of its eggs in the proverbial basket that is the BCS championship game, the BCS has made a gooey mess out of all the bowls. Yech.
During the presidential campaign, Barack Obama flung promises at his supporters like one of those T-shirt air cannons at a monster truck rally. >Amidst healing the planet and lowering the oceans, Obama said he’d also work to get a college football playoff system in place. Tell us it wasn’t just a tease, Mr. President-Elect, like Bill Clinton’s middle-class tax cuts.
Take it from me: if you want an easy re-election campaign, forget the economy and the war on terror. Install a college football playoff, and you’ll land states you’d otherwise never dream of — like Texas, Alabama, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Georgia, even Utah. The west coast will become even more of a lock, and the swing states of Florida and Pennsylvania will swing decisively your way.
So, join me tonight in toasting the new college football champion. Even if at the end of the game, we still won’t know who it is.
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