Football!...is done for another season
Ding, dong, the BCS is dead!
Though it closed another college football season, the best thing about last night’s exciting National Championship Game was that it served as the denouement for the controversial Bowl Championship Series. Coming next year: the College Football Playoff, an attempt to fuse the bowl system with a playoff format to decide a champion.
I suppose the BCS did its job. It matched the two supposedly top-ranked teams in the country for a national championship game. They may not have been the two best teams in college football, but both somehow found themselves ranked #1 or #2 after the regular season and conference championships. It was, I supposed, much more definitive than the system that crowned mythical, and sometimes multiple, champions, but the BCS was far from perfect and ideal. LSU and USC split the title in 2003. There seemed to be a lot less controversy toward the end as potential title contenders were eliminated or bolstered by conference championship games, which sometimes became de facto semi-finals.
To be frank, I am putting a lot of pressure on myself to send the BCS off in style. However, I am not feeling it. Despite all the excitement and debate it evoked (much to the appreciation of the ever burgeoning and mostly gratuitous sports media), I never liked the BCS. I was a staunch traditionalist back when it started and abhorred the thought of a non-traditional (Pac-10–Big Ten) Rose Bowl match-up; watching the likes of Miami, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and Texas play in the Rose Bowl (the game, not necessarily the stadium) made me sick. The “plus one” format, for the most part, reestablished the traditional Rose Bowl, but the game will once again be used on a rotating basis by the CFP for the semi-finals and final. I am cool with it now, mostly because I think the bowl system needs to be abandoned.
Could the bowls be incorporated into a real playoff system, like what is played at every other level of college football (at every other level of all football, as a matter of fact)? Perhaps there is a way, and I will remain open-minded. But I would much prefer a win-or-go-home playoff of twenty-four teams, much like the one played in the FCS. There could even be one play-in game so every team in the Top 25 would be included. (However, I wonder how much of the dysfunction of the BCS was linked to the arbitrary rankings. The coveted Top 25 polls are just that: the ranking of teams according to the opinion of coaches or sports writers each Sunday.) That ain’t gonna happen, especially given the flood of cash from sponsorship and television rights. Nobody in the NCAA is going to turn off that spigot. College football became big business during the BCS era and I am sure it will only get bigger until reform is imposed from outside.
The BCS is dead. Enough said.
As for the 2013 season itself: I was not as interested this year. Unlike the previous six seasons, I was not obsessed. I watched a lot of games, and attended every Iowa home game, but the ravenous obsession I felt in the past never reemerged. I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that I have fallen in love with basketball all over again. Basketball was my first love and it has slowly and surely become my favorite sport again. I still love football, and make enough fuss about it to write a season-ending blog post, but I think my interest has evolved and tamed. It was an easy-going and entertaining pastime this season. I did not take it as serious. It seems to be getting harder, especially since the game’s media-fueled self-importance has become laughable and cliché. In the past I usually watched a handful of the pre-New Years Day bowls, but this season I only cared enough to read the results in the morning paper.
It is sad the season is over, of course, but I am not counting down to next season already. There is a lot of basketball and baseball to enjoy.
