Yes

by Timothy Williams

Created on: November 28, 2009

This is a loaded question. I'm voting "yes" because in a sense there is no system more fair than the BCS. However, the BCS is actually unfair. That's the point. It's supposed to be unfair. After all, this isn't just "football." This is "college football." What makes the BCS great-and, yes, I did say great-is that nothing in any other collegiate sport resembles a collegiate course more than BCS football.

Think of the Bowl Championship Series computer formula as a professor. Dr. BCS, in charge of a Advanced Football and Football Theory course unlike any other class. Each university fields a class of some fifty players who meet a strict athletic requirement and, in many cases, meet the school's strict academic requirement as well. They have their staff of university-hired tutors, some with professional football backgrounds, others who are basically tenured tutors of football.

At the end of the season, somewhere around December, these players are graded with their teams. They have three months to make their case, and the professor places them in a final exam with a similar team. This professor is unfair, unbelievably strict, and does not argue over grades. If you've been to college, you've had a professor with nasty grading habits too. It's something we all go through. I had professors in college who insisted on only handing out a select few "A" grades, and I felt ripped off when I didn't get one. if I'd have gotten that grade, someone else wouldn't have. This is the sensation the BCS provides.

So Boise State can work harder than everyone else, bust their humps, and end up with an A when they and many casual observers feel they deserve an A+. Last year they did all their work, turned it all in on time and without error (meaning they went the entire regular season without losing a game) and got a B. In the BCS system, the teams that qualify for the big bowls get an A. The teams that play for the championship get the only two A+s. Boise State was left out of the BCS.

Yeah, everyone else has a playoff of at least sixteen teams. Those tournaments are tremendously fun to watch. I love the Final Four and I can't wait until one day when my alma mater finally makes the Frozen Four. I'm sure a college football playoff would be entertaining, and it'd leave fewer questions. That doesn't make the concept of a playoff altogether "fair" either. First and foremost, what separates the last team into thhe playoffs and the first team out of it? And do tournaments actually give us the best teams on top every year? (Was George Mason really one of the four best basketball teams in 2006?)

Still, there's something more collegiate about the somewhat arbitrary BCS. I can't help but think of the BCS rankings as a grading of the top college football teams. Florida's working on an A+, Ohio State overcame a rough quiz or two to eke out an A and a trip to the Rose Bowl, Boise State and TCU are up there in the A range, and if there's a tougher "A" it likely involves words like "quantum" and "MIT."

Imagine college football players in uniform sitting in a crowded auditorium with a little man in glasses speaking to them. "Look to your left. Look to your right. Unless any of you three chumps play in the SEC you can pretty much forget about that A+." Imagine the teams that play the politics game to improve their BCS spot as teacher's pets, and the complainers as overachieving crybabies. The BCS is just a professor in a nasty course that wouldn't be the same under some different grading scale.

The BCS is fair like life is fair. That is, it isn't, but in at least it's generally even in its unfairness. Not everybody gets a trophy in real life, not even everybody who deserves one. That's just life. Sometimes the kiss-ass gets the promotion even though you're the one doing more work. (I'm talking about you here of course, because I'm too busy going on about the BCS to claim to be that guy myself.) Sometimes the nasty professor marks you down for something you can't even control. I mean, come on, if life was fair we'd recognize these colleges as actual schools, and not simply football teams who play their home games on college campuses.

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