BCS--Bogus Championship Series

The real loser Saturday was not Alabama, who lost at home to LSU, but rather the undefeated and one-loss teams that still rank behind them in the BCS standings.

The fact that Alabama still seems likely to get a chance to play for the national title shows why the BCS selection system will never work. Simply put, it erroneously presupposes that two teams will clearly separate themselves from all other contenders come the end of the season.

To be fair, this system worked well in’99 when Florida State played Virginia Tech, in 2002 with The U and The Ohio State University, and in '05 when USC and Texas played what so far is passing for the Game of the Century.

That means, since its adoption in 1998, the BCS has managed to arrange an undisputed national title game three times. Three times out of 13. That's barely above the Mendoza Line. Surely, the teams that have been shunted to consolation bowls during one of the other ten seasons deserve better.

Take 2000. Oklahoma was the only undefeated team from a major conference, which meant they deserved a birth in the title game, but who should have been their opponent? FSU got the nod, despite the fact that they lost at Miami. Miami had lost at Washington, Washington had lost at Oregon, Oregon had lost at Oregon State, and Oregon State had lost at Washington. I was overjoyed as an obsessive FSU fan, but to this day I can’t see why they deserved to go anymore than the other four contenders.

Or take Boise State, who finished the regular season undefeated in 2006 and ’09, and likely will do so again this season. Will they get to play for the title this time? Probably not, just like they didn’t the previous two times. Is that fair? Under the current system, it’s hard to say. In '06, for example, did Boise deserve to play Ohio State more than a one-loss Florida team that had played a far more difficult schedule?

No one making an honest argument can answer that question, but the point is that no one would have to if there was a playoff.

Let’s imagine an eight-team playoff. Five bids would go the major conference winners and three to the highest ranked remainders. This would open the door for Boise and the other teams from minor conferences. It would also make the major conference races more interesting because all the contending teams would still have a chance to win the national title.

Furthermore, it would improve the quality of regular season scheduling. At present, as Oregon discovered, it does not make sense to play a high profile intersectional like LSU if your goal is to win it all. However, that would not be the case if teams knew that they could qualify for a playoff by winning their conferences.

Finally, defenders of the status quo like to point out that in college football every game matters and that this would be lost with a playoff. They're right, to an extent. The magic of the regular season would be destroyed if a playoff involved 16 teams. But an eight-team playoff would still be small enough to leave little margin for error. And it would allow more teams with one loss to remain in the hunt—which actually would add to the tension on offer during the season.

Alabama should not be eliminated because they shot themselves in the foot Saturday, but neither should Boise, Virginia Tech, Clemson, Arkansas, Wisconsin, Oklahoma, Stanford or Oregon.

These teams should be eliminated on the field, during the remainder of the regular season or in a playoff game, rather than by the BCS formula.