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.