College Football Doomsday

College football doomsday might just be upon us.  For those of you who follow the sport as closely as I do, you know that this is the last year of the Bowl Championship Series (BCS).  The BCS was created in the late 90s to do away with the old bowl system and provide fans with a true National Championship each year.  In the old bowl system, each bowl game was run like a business.  They had tie-ins with various conferences and only the teams from those conferences could play in that particular bowl game.  So if two teams like USC (PAC 10) and Alabama (SEC) were the top ranked teams and fans wanted to see them play each other, too bad, USC was going to the Rose Bowl and Alabama was going to the Sugar Bowl.  Penn State, on the other hand, along with teams like Miami and Notre Dame, were independent and had no conference affiliation, and therefore, no bowl tie ins (Penn State joined the Big Ten in 1993).  This is why Joe Paterno was able to play in every major bowl game of his time and also why Penn State has such a huge national following.  So, when Miami and Penn State were ranked Nos 1 & 2 respectively in 1986, bowl games salivated at the prospect of getting them to play in a rare 1 vs 2 matchup.  They even moved the date of the game from January 1 to January 2 so that no other sporting events would be on TV to compete.  The game had a Superbowl-like atmosphere and thankfully for us Nittany Lion fans, Penn State won.  To this day, it is the highest rated and most watched college football game in television history.  The BCS system was designed to replicate that same atmosphere and excitement every single year by guaranteeing that the top 2 teams played each other every season.  Given those parameters, the BCS system did a fine job; but most people believe, it was just a quick fix.

In the last 10 years or so, there have been plenty of controversies surrounding the BCS system.  Most of the time, these controversies center around the #3 team thinking that it should have gotten a shot at the title.  College football (or at least Division I-A football, also known as the FBS) is the only major sport in America that doesn’t have a playoff structure in place to determine its champion.  That’s why it was so exciting when last year, it was decided that college football will be moving to a 4 team playoff model starting in the 2014 season.  So say goodbye to the BCS with its whacky formulas and polls, and say hello to… a selection committee?  Yes that’s right, the 4 teams who get to compete in the playoff will be determined much like they are for the NCAA Basketball Tournament, through a committee of supposedly bright sports minds who can take a little more information into account than a computer formula can (what they like to call “the eye test”).  Now, I could write an entire post about who will be on this selection committee - which was announced today - but instead I’ll just leave this here and you can form your own opinions:

http://espn.go.com/college-football/story/_/id/9834426/college-football-playoff-selection-committee-officially-announced

I bring this up today instead because I think it would be better if the 4 team playoff started this year.  You see, the selection committee is going to weigh numerous criteria when selecting the 4 teams who will compete, and one of those criteria is winning your conference championship; more specifically, winning the championship of one of the 5 “major” conferences: Big Ten, ACC, SEC, Big 12, and PAC 12.  Well this year, something special is happening.  A team from 4 of those conferences is currently undefeated and ranked in the top 4 of the AP poll.  Those 4 teams would be Alabama (SEC), Oregon (PAC 12), Clemson (ACC), and Ohio State (Big Ten).  If things were to remain the same, and those 4 teams were ranked in that order come the end of the season, this would have been the single most ideal start to the 4-team playoff imaginable.  However, since the playoff doesn’t start until next season, instead we could see the biggest controversy of the BCS era EVER on our hands.  After all, which of those 4 teams do you leave out?

History tells us that at least 2 of those teams will slip up and lose a game by the end of the season.  But history also said that Penn State has never lost to Indiana and we saw where that got us 2 weeks ago… just saying.  But seriously, it’s completely possible that the fickle beast that is college football may have saved its biggest controversy for the final year of the BCS.  College football doomsday could be upon us, and if you’re one of the “men” that Alfred spoke of in the Dark Knight movies, maybe you’ll be just sick enough to enjoy “watching the world burn” one last time.