I’ve had several posts protesting the selection of Florida over Michigan to play Ohio State in the BCS Championship game, but this is taking things a little too far in getting the state legislature involved:
Still angry over Michigan’s exclusion from the BCS national title football game, a pair of state lawmakers are calling for a playoff system.
Sens. Mark Schauer and Mike Bishop, the incoming Democratic and Republican leaders of the Senate, say subjectivity should be removed from a process that has financial and emotional repercussions. The pro-playoff resolution they introduced Thursday is purely symbolic.
“The BCS system is clearly not working and consumers in Michigan and around the country are paying a very real price,” said Schauer, D-Battle Creek.
He said the University of Michigan will lose out on at least $10 million for going to the Rose Bowl instead of the BCS championship game, along with a possible rise in enrollment and merchandise sales that come with a national title. One-loss Florida edged out one-loss Michigan for the No. 2 ranking and the chance to face undefeated Ohio State Jan. 8.
Bishop, a Rochester Republican and Michigan graduate, said the BCS “failed miserably” and a playoff is needed to prevent future “injustices.”
“The whole purpose of the BCS was to ensure a championship game between the best two teams in college football,” he said.
The resolution says that because Division I football programs are a significant public investment, schools and the public have the right to a sound system. It notes that other NCAA divisions have football playoffs.
Christine Brennan of USA Today writes that This BCS mess is downright silly. She could write a column on that even without the benefit of this latest silliness:
The reality is that this year, even the bowls with the real names: Rose, Sugar, Orange and Cotton, are meaningless. They’ll be fun, for sure, and they’ll make somebody a lot of money, but they won’t count for anything. Same with the BCS Championship Game Jan. 8. Yes, even that one is meaningless for anyone who values the grueling, and revealing, 2006 regular season in college football.
These bowl games are insignificant, all of them, because this college football season was so significant. And because it’s now over. It ended Nov. 18 in Columbus, Ohio, when the two best teams in the nation played, and Ohio State beat Michigan by three. The only thing that was missing in that game was a neutral field, but that’s an imperfection that we’ll all have to accept.
The Florida Gators, deemed the best of the teams who have not yet played Ohio State, certainly might defeat the vaunted Buckeyes Jan. 8, and what would we have then?
Not a new definitive national champion, despite what pollsters would say. No, only proof that the layoff imposed by the people who run the “Silly Season” — a layoff so long that freshmen practically become sophomores — had made a mockery of a reasonable, telling and finite regular season, that’s what.
At the end of the game, Bowl Championship Series officials will tell us they’ve crowned a new national champion and will crow that their system has worked again. But we’ll know differently. We’ll know that this system is as flawed as any — as flawed as even the system of our childhood, which was, of course, no system at all, just a piecemeal screamfest in which sometimes three or four schools claimed to be No. 1.
What’s the difference now? If Florida wins, potentially three or four schools will shout that they are No. 1. But the difference is that the BCS men will then inform us that they have a national champion all picked out for us.
I like the old way better. It was flawed, we knew it was flawed, and no one tried to tell us it worked.
The new system is worse because it’s just as flawed, but the BCS wants us to believe it’s working. Its arrogance is especially laughable now that USA TODAY has printed the final regular-season ballots for the coaches’ poll, one of the main ingredients in the BCS selections. In this treasure trove of information, we found that coaches basically vote not their conscience, but their conference (except for Tressel, who took the incredibly decisive action of not voting at all).