Opinion: BCS still honors real champs

Obama should evaluate pre-season polls, not BCS

December 09, 2008
By Robert Jackson
Sports Editor

A lot of us seem to have forgotten you judge champions on character, not on whom they beat or who could’ve beaten them. The greatest competition is not a BCS buster, a resurgent one-loss team, or even an undefeated team. The team that wins against themselves first will always beat the opposition across from them.

In that sense the regular season of college football is an even higher-stakes playoff than the eight-team format pushed every year around December. The deeper into the season, or bracket, you progress, the more pressure put on you.

You can lose in September and have a chance at making the championships, but lose in October or November and you are definitely out of contention.

It is not arbitrary and unfair to say a team can lose in September because that just makes the rest of the regular season that much important and you get a handicap. Florida is in contention once again because of their stellar performances against then top ten teams, LSU and Georgia. In fact, of the top five teams in consideration for the National Title, nobody has a better margin of victory against top ten teams than Florida’s 34.5 difference.

If a team loses in October or November they had proven themselves up until that point, but when the test became too great, they collectively folded under the pressure. See: Texas Tech. There’s a difference in losing because there’s also a difference in playing in September and the later months of the college football season. And we overlook, in our preoccupation with finding faults, that teams that do lose once early in the season tend to demonstrate rather convincingly they belong in the national title in the subsequent months.

So, then, what happens if two one-loss teams prove convincingly they belong in the national title? Well, there is fault in throwing one of those teams out, but it does not rest with the BCS.

What needs changed are the pre-season rankings—the rankings based on nothing and often look a little like something how the season finishes, but not entirely. If pollsters are that close to predicting teams based on nothing, imagine how accurate they could be after the first month of September.

Basically the BCS does its job in pairing two teams that overcame the mental challenges the regular season handed them. An eight-team playoff only stretches the season out so much that conference champions could play 16 games—aka a regular professional NFL season—and still has to draw the line somewhere in including teams. Also, speaking about those conference championships, would Alabama and Florida have been so great and had the ratings if they both came out, unlike they did this past Saturday, running vanilla offenses and vanilla defenses?

In considering the BCS, remember how champions ought to be judged.