The times they are a changing, Mr. Jones, in our favorite professional sport: College Football. Big Time, Division One BCS-FBS Football will be coming to your city with a playoff system to determine its champion starting in 2014. In sports news terms, this is like Nixon going to China and landing on the moon on the same day in O.J. Simpson’s Bronco. This is HUGE, almost bigger than Kim Kardashian, Snooki and Justin Beiber combined.
Big Time College Football has used various methods in the past to crown a season’s champion. They used to use The UPI poll and The AP poll. Whoever was voted number one at the end of the bowl season would be the champion of that year. Even though one was voted on by college coaches who could not watch the various games because they were coaching (duh!) and the other was voted on by sports writers who were usually drinking, this was thought to be a very good method by almost nobody and usually led to Notre Dame being in at least the Top Five.
This led to the creation of The BCS (The Bowl Championship Series). The BCS relies on a combination of polls, computer selection, darts, coin tosses, whims, Kirk Heibstreit and other methods to determine relative team rankings and to narrow the field to two teams to play in The Pepsi Sears Tostitios Long John Silver’s Viagra BCS National Big Time Mythical Championship Game presented by Jiffy Lube held after the other college bowl games, on the night before you have to go back to work after the holidays, starting at 9:00 Eastern Standard Time. Of course, this pleased nobody.
Then somebody up North (figures) realized that the BCS National Championship Game was being won by teams of the Southeastern Conference. If it wasn’t LSU winning, it was Florida. If it wasn’t Florida, it was Alabama. If it wasn’t Bama, it was Auburn. Last year’s champion, Alabama, didn’t even win its conference or division.
The Old Men of College Football and the College Presidents got together and came up with a four team playoff system that will serve the academic calendar. I know I laughed when I read that the College Presidents were really concerned with academic careers of people that don’t go to class. The four teams will be chosen by a selection committee to play in games on New Year’s Eve or Day. The winners will meet on the first Monday in January that is at least six days after the last semi-final game is played or Ground Hog’s Day.
Nobody knows who will be on the selection committee or what standards they would use to determine the top four teams. The best guess it will have something to do with “wins”, so don’t look for any teams with 6-5 records, but with Notre Dame out there you never know. They may also look at the “strength of schedule” and “cheerleader hotness”
Reaction to this has been positive, sort of like finding out that your Kate Upton look-a-like fiancé cooks like Paula Dean. Most sports fans were pleasantly surprised because common sense doesn’t always flow in the sports pages. My feeling is that it sounds good , but, let’s see how it plays out. We’ll have plenty of time to learn to hate it.
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