Second Negative

Bowl Season Madness

We came back to work from our brief holiday vacation on Tuesday, and immediately held a meeting…to discuss our college football bowl pool. There are twenty-eight bowl games this year, but we excluded the French Quarter Bowl (or whatever it was called) because it was played back in October. Twenty-seven bowls? The fifty-four teams needed to fill that many slots, combined with several teams opting to stay home this year almost provided more openings than teams with winning records. Is it really necessary to have bowl games matching up teams that won six games? Do teams that go 6-6 deserve to be rewarded at the end of the season? It seems more like they narrowly escaped disaster. Perhaps the minimum requirement should be based on winning percentage, rather than total wins.

I’m currently leading our seventy person bowl pool. You can hold the congratulations as we’re only nine games in, but I’d like to thank Wyoming and Fresno State for engineering the two largest upsets of the bowl season, and securing my early lead. Based on this, I feel qualified to offer a few thoughts on the process that I may not be qualified to offer after the dust settles on January 4th.

One of the many problems with the bowl system is the BCS (Bowl Championship Series) and the travishamockery it makes out of trying to determine a legitimate national champion. It doesn’t help that it’s largely based on biased human polls (which I’ll get to in a minute) and wildly different computer models that may or may not include the strength of schedule component. Mack Brown spent a week whining about being shafted by the system and a few AP voters bumped Texas ahead of California and into the Rose Bowl for the first time in history. And what did Cal do to deserve the hand? They went down to Southern Miss, and only won by ten points in a hostile environment, under an enormous amount of pressure. Did people somehow forget the last second miracle Texas needed to knock off Kansas in the second to last game of the regular season? I guess some AP voters consider the Jayhawks world beaters, and the Golden Eagles chumps. Is that right? Want to know which team won an (admittedly extraneous) bowl game this year? Maybe the AP turncoats thought they were voting in the basketball poll.

The Associated Press poll problems can mostly be attributed to regional bias. People can float all sorts of theories about the votes going against Texas this year, but when push came to shove, it was Texas writers that helped send Texas to the Rose Bowl. Isn’t it enough that one local journalist declares before each Texas game that he expects they will “run wild” over their opponent? Hell, the Austin television media usually ONLY reports college sports news that references the Longhorns. KVUE, our local ABC affiliate, discussed the new college baseball Top 25 poll in such a way the other night, that viewers must have been left with the impression that Texas was the only ranked team in the entire state. The truth? There are four. Any guesses as to what school the KVUE sports director attended?

The AP poll is a gleaming tower of ivory compared to the crime against humanity that is the USA Today/ESPN Coaches Poll. Most of the coaches don’t even have time to watch a majority of the teams they are voting on, much less make judgments about their season based on more than win/loss record. It also doesn’t help that some coaches are ranking teams higher if they’ve played them that season, in order to make their own teams look better in the computer polls. Oklahoma’s Bob Stoops admitted in December that he’s been voting Texas #2 all year to capitalize on the strength of schedule component. The worst part is the complete failure of the coaches poll to even appear logical. A team can have the same record as another team in the same conference and division, and have lost to that team in a head to head match up, and still end up ranked four spots ahead of them in the coaches poll. Why even bother playing?

The basic flaws likely to be a part of any system do not excuse the miserable failure of the current BCS mess. There are three major and two non-major unbeaten teams, and the best we can do is one championship game selected by biased polls and contradictory computer models? A modified playoff seems to be the most sensible solution, but most college presidents won’t agree to an extended post-season until the money is right. Yes, they complain about their student athletes missing too many classes, but that’s bullshit, and most people don’t buy it anyway. When a deal can be reached that satisfies parties interested in both football and money, things will change for the better. Until then, we’re left with faulty polls, rigged seedings, and championships without a champion. In short, bowl season madness.