Playoffs? Who Said Anything About Playoffs?

The 2011 College Football season ended with a flat game with the winner of The BCS Championship being a team that: A) didn’t win their conference or B) win their division in their conference. One of these days, the winner of The BCS Championship will be a team that doesn’t win a game and doesn’t play football.

In the greatest song ever written about my people, “Rednecks” by Randy Newman, he says, “College men from LSU: went in dumb-come out dumb, too”. It was never more true than Monday night. The LSU offensive game plan included this play: “Drop the ball then fall on it”. Jordan Jefferson, the LSU quarterback has never looked more out of it than Monday night, and that is saying something.

It was a year that began with a rabid Alabama fan (are there any other kind?) poisoning the iconic Oak Trees at Toomer’s Corner on the Auburn campus and then calling a radio sports talk show to brag about it. Harvey Updyke was caught, arrested, and will face trail on March 17, 2012 for poisoning those trees. Of course, he has a Facebook page requesting donations to help pay for his expenses which include his $50,000 bond. (Updyke was in New Orleans for the game. Fortunately for Mike The Tiger, Alabama won.)

To show you how bad this past College Football season has been, there may be, hopefully, possibly some kind of discussion about changing the current the BCS system into something that might make sense. The BCS (Bowl Championship Series) system began in 1998 after years and years and years and years of complaints that the Division One “system” of choosing a champion was based on the votes of coaches (who were too busy with their own games to pay attention to how other teams were playing) and sports writers (who were too drunk to pay attention to how teams that were not named Notre Dame were playing).

So the powers that be came up with a formula which included a poll of coaches, a computer ranking, and the eye of a newt to create The BCS. It turns out, amazingly, that this system was just about as dumb.

The University Presidents liked The BCS because it sounded so smart and foolproof. It should be noted that there are three other divisions of NCAA Football and they use this thing called a playoff. Radical idea, I know, since a range of bowls has grown up over the past 40 years that pay schools to play in their lil'l bowl games. These bowls used to have names like “The Bluebonnet Bowl” and “The Peach Bowl”. Now they have names like “The Fight Homophobia and Other Oppressions of The Ninety-Nine Per Cent Bowl”.

Since the main job of a University President is to raise money, the idea of gutting the Bowl System is killing a goose that lays a golden egg, even if it is “The R + L Carriers New Orleans Have We Mention Katrina Bowl” golden egg. So the University Presidents have, in the past, raised the specter that having a playoff system would interfere with the football players’ studies, particularly their final exams. I will allow you a few minutes to quit laughing over that one.

Was it the Rube Goldberg contraption of The BCS that has caused the various conferences to revisit the idea of a playoff? Of course not, it was the fact that The SEC has won the last six BCS Championship games and that this last game featured two teams from The SEC. This has caused The NCAA to lose money and nothing makes The NCAA move like losing money.

Knowing The NCAA, they’ll create a new system that will sort of/kind of be a playoff that will guarantee Notre Dame will always be in hunt for a National Championship. Either that or the National Championship team will be named by Kirk Herbstreit before the season begins.