B(c)S Monkey Business

The BCS has recently drummed up new propaganda for itself by hiring a former White House press agent. Wow. Are times really that tough? On its new website, www.playoffproblem.com, the BCS states,

"College football is more successful and more popular, more thrilling and more enjoyable than ever. Attendance, TV viewership, fan interest and revenues are at record highs. Any playoff scheme would jeopardize this great success, while threatening the wonderful and unique nature of the bowls. If you think the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) is controversial, wait until you realize how much more contentious a playoff would be.

"A bracket-style playoff wouldn't end the debate, it would only fuel it. Advocates of a hypothetical playoff can't agree on how to resolve key playoff questions: who, what, where and when."

Methinks there is fowl play about.

Let's go through this point by point, like the ignorant fans the BCS thinks we are, and get this straightened out.

My first question: if the BCS system is generating so much "fan interest" in the game, if college football is "more successful and more popular, more thrilling and more enjoyable than ever," then why the need to hire a former White House press agent to drum up support for itself? Why does the BCS feel the need to defend itself? If it's not guilty of anything, if it's working successfully and its end product is so goddamn enjoyable and successful, why the sudden marketing campaign?

The BCS is not successful. It's not enjoyable. Whose definitions of "successful," "thrilling," and "enjoyable" are we using here? By the BCS' own standards, I'm sure it is successful and enjoyable; if my system of income was generating this much money, while excluding competition with those who could potentially lower my income, I'd claim it to be successful and enjoyable as well. What wealthy, corporate executives do you know, who make millions of dollars a year by summarily removing their competition, who don't consider their endeavors successful, thrilling and enjoyable? Of course the BCS thinks it's successful - its members are filthy goddamn rich, and they have no competition because they won't let anyone else join their 6-Conference country club.

And this is coming from a Notre Dame alumnus, remember; I know these types, inside and out. I spent five years surrounded by them, getting a fantastic education, and having it pounded into my head that one day I was going to be everyone's boss, if not the company owner. I lived in that country club and shook my head at the attitudes, and still do: nobody likes a life-sucking corporate asshole.

Speaking of which, on its Playoff Problem website, the BCS asks several questions, claiming in its introductory statement (quoted above) that advocates of a playoff disagree about the playoff's potential components. Well we can start by deducing that at least the playoff proponents agree on one fundamental thing: the BCS sucks monkey weiner and we need a playoff. But, hey, let's review the BCS' questions for shits and giggles anyway.

In a bracket-style playoff system:

1. Who would participate? Hmm. I'm going to go out on a limb here. Most of what I've read from playoff advocates involves the idea that conference winners would participate. There are 11 Division-I (FBS, I know) conferences. And if the point of a playoff system, in replacing the unfair exclusions of the BCS, is to expand competition and fairness to all Division-I schools, then we'd have to simply say that each conference winner is an automatic qualifier in the bracket playoff system. Depending on the nature of the playoff bracket, we could see 12 total teams, one being a wildcard, or 16 teams total, but the point is that 11 conference winners make up the heart of the playoff. The problem with the BCS' determination of which teams currently qualify for bowls lies fundamentally in its basis of those AQ teams in the poll system. I will say this time and time again: eliminate the poll system and replace it with what we in the rest of the sports world call "standings." Standings determine conference winners. Standings determine wildcard teams. If there are ties, incorporate record versus strength of schedule after the season to determine the 1 or 5 wildcard teams, in a 12- or 16-team playoff bracket, respectively. It's simple, folks. The polls have no place whatsoever in sports; standings do. Period.

2. How many automatic qualifiers? This question was answered above. It's simple. It's fair. Eleven conference winners automatically qualifying, promotes and expands competition, not only within the conferences, but between the conferences. If a team wants to make the playoffs, it better damn well win every game on its schedule. The idea of conference winners automatically qualifying for the playoffs gives far more meaning to the regular season because just one little loss could cost a team a chance to automatically qualify. Each game carries more weight. Competition would be at an all-time high in college football. And even with one or two losses in a season, competition would remain, with the notion that there are wildcard spots to fill. This isn't rocket science.

3. What would be the criteria to qualify? Seriously? Win the f*ckin conference, win every game you can, and play your ass off all year long. How is that for "criteria?" Who the hell needs any other motivation? Criteria?! It seems to me that the point of sports is to win as much as possible. The teams that win the most end up in a playoff, wherein they compete against each other, having been the best teams in the sport that season, and the winner of all those best teams ends up the champion. Again, it's such a simple idea, but apparently this is foreign to the BCS, which apparently likes the idea of arbitrary criteria to decide its champion... like polls, and opinions, and coaches, and sports writers... What has happened, in college football, to the idea of having the best record and winning your conference? "Oh, but what would we do about independents Notre Dame and Navy?" (I wish you could hear me giggling). Umm... they'd have to join conferences if they wished to participate? Just a thought.

4. What would be the criteria for seedings? See the answer to question #3. You BCS types are relentless in your bullshit. How much more arbitrary crap can you come up with to ruin this great American sport? You want to incorporate factors for weather conditions, turf, stadium capacity, pull of gravity at certain points, the earth's magnetic field, time of day, sun position in the sky, size of players, atomic composition of particular footballs used? Jesus, people. Win the conference. Win as much as possible. Make the playoffs. Win more. Win the championship game. Christ Almighty...

5. Where would the games be played? Let me answer that by asking you this: where the fuck are they played now?! Every playoff advocate with whom I've spoken is all for keeping the current bowls in place. The playoff system has nothing to do with getting rid of the bowl system. The bowl system has been around almost as long as college football itself; it's rich with tradition, it increases postseason attendance, it's fun for the fans, it boosts TV revenues, corporate sponsors, etc. It helps the game. So from what I gather among us playoff advocates is that we'd simply keep the bowls where they are, remove the shitty BCS system, institute our playoff bracket, and use the current traditional bowls in which to play the playoffs.

6. When would the games be played? Again: when the fuck are they played now?! Goddamn...

7. If you could resolve all that, would everyone be satisfied? Of course not. The point isn't to satisfy everyone. Clearly. The BCS certainly doesn't satisfy everyone. But the BCS doesn't even satisfy the majority of college football fans now. That's the enjoyable part of the playoff system - it allows the fans to experience a more meaningful regular season, to continue to travel to bowl games for the playoffs, and to feel satisfaction in witnessing a fair and competitive system of sports. At this point in the development of the BCS, there are fans of teams in non-AQ conferences that don't even watch their teams anymore because they realize the futility, in that those teams will never, under the current system, win a national championship; there are fans of teams in AQ conferences that stop watching after the third week if their team starts 0-3, knowing that their team would almost certainly not contend for a national title with 3 losses. The point is that right now, with this current wreck of a BCS system, the majority of fans and teams are not satisfied. With a playoff system, competition is open. It's extended to all 11 conferences in Division-I football. It gives every school a more levelled playing field on which to compete, recruit, and enter into a playoff postseason. And I think the sport owes it to the fans, to those who line the pockets of university presidents and administrations and corporate sponsors, to produce a fair, competitive, enjoyable, thrilling, successful product on the field, throughout the regular season, throughout the postseason, in the minds of the fans instead of only in the minds of the university presidents and corporate dickheads who currently suck the system dry of all its money.

Let me make one thing extremely clear at this point: the BCS was created of itself, by itself, for itself. It doesn't give one rat's ass about Joe College Football Fan like you and me. It doesn't care how unhappy or dissatisfied you are that your non-AQ team is 11-1 and doesn't have a chance to play that AQ 10-2 team in the title game. It doesn't care this year that Boise State or TCU or even Cincinnati won't play for a national title because the bottom line is that those schools won't bring them as much money as schools like Florida, Alabama, Texas, Ohio State, USC (even when they suck), Notre Dame (even when they've sucked for 15 years) and Oklahoma. The bottom line for the BCS is money; it always has been and it always will be. It's not fairness, it's not competition, it's not a true national champion resulting from a playoff system, it's not mirroring every other sport on earth and their systems, and it's certainly not about the sport of college football itself. College football, to the BCS, is a business. Nothing else.

The BCS' original statement from its Playoff Problem introduction - "Any playoff scheme (scheme?!) would jeopardize this success..." - is spot-on. Of course it would jeopardize their success. It would remove money from their pockets and would level the playing field with every other current-non-AQ conference in Division-I football. And that's the last thing they want. They exist, like any other corporate entity, (calling it pretty things like "coalition" doesn't remove its true identity) to make money.

And, on its website, asking fans to propose playoff scenarios so it can use seemingly disagreeing opinions of playoff advocates to bolster its own self-image is a cheap way to go about marketing itself. It also presupposes that those fans it's polling are ignorant and blind. Well, Mr Exclusive Corporate BCS Moneymaker, here's a nice literary middle finger from small-town, college-football-fan America, and from all of us silly playoff advocates out here who would enjoy a fair, competitive, true system of sports in college football: fuck you.

The House That Mandel Built

So Stewart Mandel wants a plus-one college football "playoff," as he calls it. Go ahead, click on the link and read his latest article. It's entertaining... like watching a 3 year old trying to do calculus. It amazes me that people with such little common sense and awareness somehow find the national spotlight. Kind of like the BCS itself.

Mandel claims that the BCS has caused the regular season to become more meaningful, in that fans across the country are forced to care about what's going on in the rest of college football, rather than simply focusing on their own teams. He also claims that before the BCS, fans in, say Oregon, wouldn't have cared about what happened in, say Iowa. He further makes the point that the same would result from an eight or sixteen team playoff system, without the BCS.

Let's take a closer look, shall we?

Supposedly, the BCS has made the regular season in college football more meaningful. I'm lost right off the bat. Perhaps my brain is too slow to pick up on what's going through Mr Mandel's head. Because I have a completely opposing observation about the BCS in this regard: it undermines the regular season for any team, or fan of a team, which doesn't belong to a major conference (especially the Big Six Conferences) or which doesn't win a conference championship. To my pea-brain understanding, a 12-0 Big Ten champion, for example, would receive an automatic bid into a major BCS bowl because it's a member of one of the six major BCS conferences. But if, say, Akron wins the MAC at 12-0, the BCS chuckles, brushes the Akron Zips cooties off its arm, and continues on its way to Columbus. What incentive does the University of Akron have to win its conference and go undefeated? There's no major bowl guarantee. There's not even a mediocre bowl guarantee or a national ranking guarantee. The same is true for a runner-up team in one of the six major conferences; even if a team like that posts a 10-2 record, finishing second in its conference, the BCS - despite the team's pretty damn good 10-2 record - has no major bowl for that team to play in. The BCS is set up to cater specifically to the six major conferences in the country and nothing else; its bowl system with automatic qualifiers completely undermines the regular season for any school and any conference outside the Big Six.

If anything, the BCS has turned the regular season into a joke for college football; we know from the outset that if the top several teams in the human preseason polls (which, of course are based solely on what a team did the previous season, and on hollow opinions of a select group of individuals who have yet to see what a team can actually do - or has done - on a [baby talk voice] real live football field) go undefeated, their selections in the major BCS bowls, including the national title game, are guaranteed. The human polls guarantee several teams in the six major conferences a top preseason spot in the rankings (be honest, when was the last time you saw TCU ranked at all, let alone as a preseason #1?), and as long as they don't lose, the BCS finishes the job by guaranteeing those predetermined top teams a bowl slot at the end of the year, two of which play in a "title" game... so the BCS says.

Mr Mandel, your logic is wearing thin.

Stewart claims next that fans from one team or conference couldn't care less about teams from another conference prior to the BCS system. So you're telling me that in 1993 when Notre Dame was ranked #2 in the country, I wasn't glued to my tv, as a Notre Dame fan, watching every last move of #1 Florida State? Are you out of your mind, sir? You're telling me that without a BCS system guaranteeing top bowl spots and title game spots to six major conferences, Oregon wouldn't care what Iowa was doing? It seems to me - and bear with me while I sort this out - that in the AP & Coaches polls that determined the fate of teams prior to the BCS, if teams were ranked at all, they and their fans cared about what every other ranked team in the country was doing, based on the simple fact that the more a team wins, the higher it's ranked. Seems pretty simple to me. What ever did we do without the Holy & Sacred BCS telling us to care about what other ranked teams were doing?

And now somehow Mr Mandel claims that the same national disinterest in the regular season would occur in a true playoff system format. Whew. I have to crack my knuckles and sit down for this one. Is the NFL regular season meaningless? How about the NBA? NHL? MLB? What about the NCAA basketball season? Or NCAA hockey season? Can I stop now? Do these teams have nothing to play for? Do their fans have nothing to care about? Do corporate sponsors lose money because of a playoff system? Stewart, claiming that the regular season doesn't matter is like looking an astrophysicist square in the eye and telling him that the universe is jealous and hungry: it makes absolutely no sense.

All this talk about a plus-one "playoff" system is driving me insane. It's like saying "Let's just add another bowl game to the BCS. Nevermind the preseason rankings and how those teams rarely fall out of the top ten. Nevermind that in a plus-one scheme, the BCS still exists with its six major conferences and automatic qualifiers. Nevermind the human opinions still counting for 2/3 of the BCS' so-called formula." Are you people nuts? Adding a plus-one format to the already corrupt BCS system is like putting a band-aid on a f*ckin heart attack: the problem isn't going away folks!

If anything at all, a true playoff system would increase interest in the regular season. If every team from every Division I-A conference had a potential shot at a playoff spot, which in turn gives them a shot at a national title, it seems to this humble Notre Dame grad and college football fan that every team and every fan of every team would have an immediate vested interest in the regular season. And - I know I may have gone temporarily insane here - if we got rid of the human-opinion-based national preseason rankings, er, I mean the poll system, and simply calculated a team's final regular season record against its strength of schedule (based on their opponents' records, and their opponents' opponents' records), seeded the top 8 or 12 or 16 at the end of the regular season, placed them into a playoff bracket, and let them duke it out like every other goddamn sport in the world, we could finally sit back in our armchairs in January, sip a little hot cocoa, and have a rousing discussion about the actual national champion... instead of wasting our time writing articles that promote the existing system with an addendum, that lines the pockets of the six major conferences, that built the self-serving BCS, that lives in the house that Mandel built.

The existing corporate-and-major-conference-sponsored BCS system simply doesn't work to produce true competition, an interested fan base, or a true national champion. It does, however, produce a nice, sparkling BCS System "winner," crowned with all the corporate logo sponsorship feces it can bestow. And all that horseshit makes me ill.

The BCS Proft Share

Steve Campbell of the Houston Chronicle: Contrary to popular belief, the BCS isn’t an actual entity. The BCS is a five-bowl arrangement (Fiesta, Orange, Rose, Sugar and National Championship Game) managed by the 11 NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision (formerly Division I-A) conferences and Notre Dame. Six conferences — Big 12, Big Ten, Southeastern, Pac-10, Big East and Atlantic Coast — plus Notre Dame (if it meets certain criteria) have automatic qualification (AQ) into the BCS bowls.

The top two teams in the Bowl Championship Standings — a compendium of two human polls and six computer ranking systems — meet in the title game. The automatic qualifiers, along with a pool of at-large teams, fill out the other spots in the lucrative BCS bowls. A team from outside the AQ conferences can earn an at-large bid by finishing in the top 12 in the BCS standings. The BCS bowls are not contractually obligated to take more than one team from outside the AQ conferences...

So here we have it: the BCS is a group of people who got together to ensure that they, and their respective institutions, are guaranteed money. Let's not beat around the proverbial bush. It's as clear as any truth can be. Someone sat down and said, "Psst! Hey guys, listen up. Great idea here. What if we all got together and created a system that guaranteed all of us obscene annual revenues? What if we presided over this system so that we could decide who's in and who's out? What if we pretended that we were doing it under the guise of 'fairness?' "

I've studied a lot of American history and government in the past 20 years. It fascinates me, all the secrecy and goings on behind the scenes. The Federal Reserve Bank, a privately owned corporation, controls the United States government, and thereby its people, through the regulation of money, inflation, and interest rates, constantly holding the government and country in a perpetual state of debt through the interest the government owes the Fed for the manufacture and, in essence, sale of money to the government. The Fed runs the show, and you're fooling yourself if you don't see that. It institutes organizations, it influences and "suggests" legislation, and in essence passes its own laws into existence through the United States government. It gives itself power. It's never been audited, and recently, it's had trouble explaining the "disappearance" of several trillion dollars. The Federal Reserve Bank Corporation is not only above the law; it is the law. It is accountable to no one. This is simple, historical, proven, obvious fact.

The BCS is no different. I'm no conspiracy theorist; I like the truth. And with this particular topic, I can't ignore the obvious, and I don't think any respectable college football fan can ignore it either. This is, plain and simple, a system of itself, by itself, and for itself, that decides its own members, and guarantees itself huge profits at the expense of those on the outside. As Mr Campbell wrote, The BCS bowls are not contractually obligated to take more than one team from outside the AQ conferences. Does it get any more blatantly exclusive than this?! BCS Members have simply formed their organization, created memberships, and guaranteed themselves insane amounts of money through their "bowl championship" system, giving themselves the exclusive right to decided who gets into that bowl system! If they don't want you and your school, you don't get in. Too bad, so sad.

How is this in any way fair and ethically correct?

The BCS, under the premise of "fairness" and "crowning a true national champion," has usurped the sport of college football, taken away the level playing field, and forced a large number of schools into sporting oblivion. Each year another "champion" is heralded as the best team in the land, without going through an elimination-style playoff system. Each year that "champion" is from the Big 12, Big 10, SEC, Pac 10, etc - one of the six major conferences in the BCS. Do you think that one of those "at-large" teams will ever win a national title under the BCS? Do you think those corporate bloodsuckers who run the BCS would ever allow that to happen, as it would take money out of their hands and place it into the hands of some supposedly insignificant little school in the middle of nowhere?

The BCS is about one thing: guaranteeing sickeningly large amounts of revenue to the six major college football conferences, exclusively, at the expense of any other team it deems an "outsider," and at the expense of hardworking, tax-paying fans, while operating under its own rules and regulations, that have thus far been untouchable.

Why else do you think teams like Florida, Texas, USC, LSU, Oklahoma, and Ohio State keep winning national titles even with one loss going into the title game, and teams from "insignificant" conferences with undefeated records are kept from even playing in the title game in the first fucking place?! Folks, it's no coincidence that every single BCS National Champion has been from one of the six major conferences that comprise its membership.

How much more obvious do we need this to be before we decide that it's nothing but an exclusive, biased, revenue-generating, sports-based profit sharing scheme?

Do you believe in the Federal Reserve Bank? Do you want to sell Amway? In that case, the BCS is for you. And I have a bridge in New York to sell you. Give me a call.