by Kelly Thompson

Created on: April 29, 2009   Last Updated: May 11, 2009

I'll argue two main reasons why I believe the the BCS system is unfair to teams playing Division I college football, and then I'll argue in favor of the "P-word."

The BCS system is predominantly unfair due to its over-reliance on strength of schedule to determine how good a team is during the regular season. There exist several sub-points to this argument that prove the point as a whole. First, teams do not get to choose what conference they are in. A football team's conference determines (in most cases) between 6 and 10 and its' games for the entire season. If my conference's highest rated team is number 100 in the college football rankings, then even if I go undefeated I will never be able to play for a national title, or even be in a premiere BCS game.

Second, a lot of teams who attempt to schedule more difficult opponents are denied contracts by top tier BCS programs. Everyone in favor of S.O.S. argues that people should just schedule more difficult opponents, but they forget that it has to be a mutual agreement. If I coach at Akron, for instance, I have to beg USC to play me year in and year out if I want to garner some national recognition. And if I'm the coach at USC, I can only schedule 3-4 of those games a year (if any at all) to still be a legitimate national title contender - because of the S.O.S. factor! (And because I have to play "X" number of conference games.) Finally, what's the point? Even if my Zips beat USC, and run the table of our conference, we might get invited to play in the Chick-Fil-A bowl or something. It is simply unfair and unreasonable to base so much of the national championship game on this (almost exclusively) arbitrary statistic.

Second, I believe that the BCS system has an over reliance on computers, as well. A couple of reasons why I feel that this is true exist. The first and most obvious one is that a computer cannot tell if a game is close, a blown call is made, if it goes in to overtime or if my starting quarterback got knocked unconscious. You know what it sees? It sees the loss that I suffered to the 112th team in the RPI, and my season is over. This is a ridiculous standard that has kept many national championship contenders out of the final poll because for 1 game out of the year, we played badly. Additionally, it too heavily favors the favorites. If a team is picked preseason to advance to the national championship game, then it is very difficult to knock them from that spot - this is particularly true late in the season when there are a lot of one loss teams vying for a spot. The 2003 Oklahoma Sooners are a prime example. They were preseason favorites to win it all and played poorly down the stretch and got smacked hard in the Big XII championship game 35-7. They still got to play for the national title. Conversely, those same Wildcats (in 1998) were NOT the preseason #1, nor even talked about being in contention until late in the season. Finally they were ranked #1 going in to the same Big XII title game. They, too, lost the Big XII game, to Texas A & M due to a blown officials call in the endzone. But, the Wildcats did not get the opportunity because they didn't have enough style points leading up to the game.

The playoff system makes more sense. We use it at every level of every other sport. A 16 game playoff gives you 11 conference winners and 5 at-large bids, significantly reducing the amount of injustices, and almost guaranteeing that your entire season does not come down to one single game (or bad performance, or blown call). A playoff solves a lot of issues.

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