The BCS Is Indefensible
By John Feinstein
Special to washingtonpost.com
Monday, December 8, 2008; 3:44 PM</p>
<p>Almost all the talk in college football today will focus on three teams:
Florida, Oklahoma and Texas. The first two will play for the national championship on January 8th in Miami because a bunch of computers decided a week ago that Oklahoma’s 11-1 was better than Texas’s 11-1 even though Texas defeated Oklahoma on a neutral field in October. So much for deciding championships on the field of play.</p>
<p>The Bowl Championship Series – as any right-thinking person, including The President-elect of the United States knows – is the worst idea (though a far less important one) to afflict this country since the outgoing President decided it might be a good idea to launch a war against Iraq. Much like the outgoing President, the presidents of the 66 BCS schools, stubbornly and selfishly refuse to admit they’re wrong. Even as President-elect Obama was calling for a playoff system they were happily signing a new four-year contract to extend the BCS through 2014.
The defenders of the BCS are so wrong and so off-base it makes me angry. Grant Teaff, the executive director of The American Football Coaches Association told The New York Times’ Bill Rhoden last week that he “laughed out loud,” when President-elect Obama suggested a playoff system. He went on to explain that the incoming President simply didn’t understand how difficult it would be to set up a playoff system.</p>
<p>Oh please. It would take about 15 minutes of common sense thinking and planning to set up a playoff system whether you wanted eight teams, 12 teams (the ideal number just like the NFL’s Super Bowl system) or even 16 teams. Complicated? Sure, and figuring out where the sun will rise tomorrow is also pretty tough in Teaff’s world. Teaff, like a lot of other apologists, also trotted out the old line about how terrible it would be if the bowl system was “eliminated,” by a playoff. There is not one person on earth who has said anything about eliminating the bowl system. Let’s go through this one more time: a playoff would enhance the bowl system. Seven bowls each year would be sites for playoff games. Let’s just look at this year’s Orange Bowl (a.k.a. The Peach Bowl South). Do you think there would be more interest in a quarterfinal playoff game between the No. 4 and No. 5 seeds, Alabama and Southern California, or in the matchup between Cincinnati and a four-loss Virginia Tech team? Friends and family will watch Cincinnati-Virginia Tech. Alabama-USC would sell out in minutes and draw a huge TV rating as would all the other playoff games.</p>
<p>As for the second tier bowls, they would be un-affected. Florida Atlantic, North Carolina State and Notre Dame could all continue to take their 6-6 records to bowl games. There’s plenty that should change about the bowl system (like 6-6 teams not going; like about 10 of them going away; like all the tie-ins made prior to the season) but a playoff would not bring about any of those changes.</p>
<p>The best recent description of the BCS actually comes from a national columnist who was trying to defend it. He made the point that the BCS may be a train wreck, but everyone stops to look at a train wreck. Putting aside the point that more people would stop to look at an actual championship, the question is this: while everyone is looking, how do the people inside the train feel? How do the players at Texas and Texas Tech feel about the train that wrecked their 11-1 seasons and sent them to another bore of a BCS Bowl (Texas’s matchup with Ohio State in the Fiesta Bowl) and a non-BCS bowl (Texas Tech taking on an 8-4 Mississippi team in the Cotton Bowl).
Let’s throw Boise State into that wrecked train too. The Broncos went 12-0 a couple years after proving their program could hang with the big boys when they beat Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl. They finished ahead of Ohio State in the BCS’s own rankings. But, because the rules say only one non-BCS team must be invited to a BCS bowl (if ranked in the top 12), sixth-ranked Utah will go to the Sugar Bowl while ninth-ranked Boise State gets to play in the Poinsettia Bowl on December 23. If you are looking for a non-major bowl to watch that game, with TCU as the Broncos opponent, is far more worthy of your attention than Cincinnati-Virginia Tech. Ohio State gets to play Texas (yawn) instead of Boise State because even though it was 10-2 and didn’t beat a team ranked higher than 18th in the BCS poll and played in a two team conference all year, it is part of the Big Ten and the BCS boys take care of their own whenever they can. The ratings for Ohio State-Texas; Virginia Tech Cincinnati and Alabama-Utah will be miniscule. The only BCS bowl that will get any kind of rating other than the championship game will be Penn State-USC in The Rose Bowl, in part because if there is one bowl that really does have tradition it is the Rose Bowl, and because the matchup is fascinating with Joe Paterno who will be 82 by kickoff and it is possible it might be his last game. Let’s hope Paterno comes back. College football needs a lot more of him and a lot less of guys like Nick Saban, who can somehow connect losing a game to 9-11, and a lot less of the presidents, commissioners, athletic directors and blowhard executive directors of coaches associations who continue to defend what is so clearly indefensible.</p>
<p>There is one other thing college football needs sooner rather than later if one truly cares about the traditions of the game: someone who can fix Army’s broken football program. The Cadets (who need to stop this silliness of calling themselves the Black Knights) were humiliated on Saturday for a seventh straight year by Navy. The final score was 34-0 and the game was over when the Mids scored three minutes in to take a 7-0 lead. You could actually see the players on the Army sideline sag as they watched a re-run of the same nightmare they have lived every year since 2002 begin to unfold. Navy has done just about everything right since it hired Paul Johnson seven seasons ago. It will play in its sixth straight bowl this year (and not with a 6-6 record; it is 8-4) and it has now won an almost unthinkable 13 straight games against Army and Air Force. The six victories over Air Force, each of them hard-fought to the end, are a reflection of how good Navy has become under Johnson and now under Ken Niamatalolo, who has done a remarkable job in his first year after Johnson left for Georgia Tech last December. Air Force is also a very solid program, 8-4 under second-year Coach Troy Calhoun – in a Mountain West Conference far superior right now to both the ACC, the Big East and maybe the Big Ten – who has rebuilt the proud program that had slipped in Fisher DeBerry’s final years.</p>
<p>Navy’s seven straight wins over Army by an average margin of 39-10 (think about that) are a reflection of the complete incompetence within the Army athletic program, dating back to the disastrous decision to briefly join Conference USA and the even worse decisions to hire Rick Greenspan as athletic director (he also ruined basketball at Indiana if you’re scoring at home) and Todd Berry as football coach. Army has now had 12 straight losing seasons and hasn’t won more than four games in any of them. Its record during that time is an incomprehensible 30-109. This year’s second straight 3-9 is at least an improvement on the 0-13 delivered by Berry and Greenspan in 2003. The only good news is that Army is back to running the option, the offense that every successful service academy team has used for the last 25 years. Current Coach Stan Brock, who was forced last spring to install the option after he had once called it “a stupid idea,” needs to be replaced. Army needs to hire a coach with real ties to the school and affection for the place, the traditions and the history – Kansas offensive coordinator Ed Warriner and New York Giants assistant coach Mike Sullivan (an Army
grad) jump to mind instantly – and it needs to surround the new coach with coaches who played at Army or have coached at Army and know something about the option offense.</p>
<p>What’s gone at Army is unfair to all those who have played there, past and present. They deserve better. Beyond that, the tradition of the Army-Navy game deserves better. Army-Navy games aren’t supposed to be over at halftime. They’re supposed to be decided in the last 10 seconds. In the mid-90s, Army won five straight games against Navy. The average margin of victory in those five games was two points. In 1996, after Army’s last great team (the Cadets were 10-2) beat a very good (9-3) Navy team by keeping the Mids out of the end zone on four plays inside the 10-yard line in the final minute, Bob Sutton (who never should have been fired as Army’s coach) pointed at the clock as quarterback Ronnie McAda took a knee on the game’s final play.
“We killed them,” he said. “We had it won with eight seconds left.” That’s the way Army-Navy should be. It is up to Army’s leadership to stop making excuses (something no Cadet is ever allowed to do) and get serious about bringing in people who will make the Army-Navy game – not just what surrounds the game – great again.
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