More BCS talk? No thanks

It’s time for college football season to enter its final weeks. That beautiful time of year when… It’s time for college football season to enter its final weeks. That beautiful time of year when the snow starts falling, less Kirk Herbstreit is in the foreseeable future and we can all sit by a fire and argue about how terrible the Bowl Championship Series is. Or argue about how it works perfectly fine. Or how it kind of works but there must be better methods on how to handle the end of the college football season. Just in case someone is reading this that isn’t quite sure how the BCS works, or wants a quick refresher, here goes. The BCS was formed in 1998 as a way to ensure the top two college football teams in the nation play in the championship game. It also picks what teams play in the other BCS games: the Orange Bowl, Fiesta Bowl, Sugar Bowl and Rose Bowl. It uses a combination of polls voted on by the media and coaches. It adds in strength of schedule, number of losses and eight more rankings compiled by computers that use different statistics to come up with numbers that inevitably tell us why Ohio State is worthy of a televised execution every January. See, that was fun in a ‘Schoolhouse Rock’ kind of way. Oh, you probably should’ve sung that last part. Go reread it, I’ll wait. Good? OK, now a lot people complain about why the BCS fails. Many of those people want a playoff system ‘mdash; like most other sports have ‘mdash; to determine which team is the national champ. They say things like, ‘Bah, you can’t let subjective humans and computers determine who plays for the title,’ and ‘Bah, let the boys see which team is best out on the field.’ They’re not sheep. People who complain just say ‘bah’ at the beginning of their sentences a lot to signify displeasure in the topic of their conversation. Of course, there are those that defend it. They claim that every regular season game counts more when there’s no playoff, and that there haven’t really been too many years in which the two best teams didn’t play for the title. This brings us to 2003, when USC, Louisiana State and Oklahoma all finished the year with one loss. Although USC was ranked No. 1 in both human polls, it was ranked third in the BCS poll. So LSU and Oklahoma played in the national championship. LSU won, and USC won its bowl game, so the two shared the national title after USC remained No. 1 in both polls. Most opponents to the BCS want a playoff system, or something they call a ‘plus-one,’ in which there are two semi-final games and the winners meet in the championship. Those seem like admirable ideas, but it won’t get rid of the arguing. In the age of the Internet and 24-hour sports networks, we need something to argue over, and it’s only so often that a football player accidentally shoots himself or Curt Schilling answers the world’s most pressing sports issues in blog form. Even president-elect Barack Obama said he’d like to see a playoff system in place. But he’s a pretty thin guy, so don’t bank on him just yet. That leaves it to us, and it’s time to start thinking creatively. 1. We could play four-way games. It’s something that hasn’t made its way to earth yet, but it’s huge in outer space. You have four teams playing at once. You enlarge the field so that the middle section of the field stretches out 100 yards horizontally. Have two teams play like they’d regularly play, and two teams playing the opposite way on this new field in the middle of the old field. They switch after one quarter, and at the half the first games end. The two winners then play on the regular field for the second half. The losers become vendors in the stands. And presto, you have just eliminated three teams in the time it normally takes to eliminate one. Can you say 65-team tourney? 2. The top 16 teams could engage in a Quidditch tournament. 3. All of the teams could take turns being interviewed and taking part in challenges. Whichever team Paris Hilton decides she wants to be her best friend wins the national championship. 4. We try out the eight team tournament. Take the winner from the six major conferences and two non-BCS school teams. Use their regular season rankings to set up seeds, let them play it out and watch as people partially enjoy it while others still complain because it’s never going to end. 5. Using the top-25 rankings after the final week of the regular season, the eight teams with the highest combined GPA could meet up in a quiz bowl. We go to the plus-one. 6. We let humans decide who gets into the championship game, but computers play it out and pick the winner. Or we let computers decide who plays and wins, and wait for the rest of the takeover. Or we could all just shut up and accept that it’s a partially broken system in which it’s nearly impossible for a non-BCS team or school not ranked in the supposedly meaningless preseason rankings to play for the national title. On the other hand, it’s college basketball season and that not only has the NCAA Tournament ‘mdash; the greatest event in sports ‘mdash; but it also has no Kirk Herbstreit.