Miss College Football 2008 is...LSU!
LSU, almost kept out of the BCS title game for having two losses, won that game last night, trouncing Ohio State 38-24. LSU’s season makes a fine case for replacing the moronic “Bowl Championship Series” with a playoff. Arguing with a sort of self-conscious perversity – the only way to do it – against a playoff system to decide the NCAA division I champion in football, the indispensable Josh Levin at Slate wrote, back in November:
“Since every team has proven itself undeserving of this year’s title, there’s only one truly fitting way to end the season, by calling off the BCS title game.”
But this sentiment is comprehensible only within the singular, indeed bizarre, criteria that have evolved in the world of high-stakes college football. In other sports, even other football organizations, a team doesn’t “prove itself” deserving of a title through a weekly series of ad hoc beauty pageants. This “system” evolved over eras very different from the current one. In the pre-parity era, you could expect a handful of elite programs to flirt with an undefeated season. The last man standing – at 12-0, or 11-0-1, or 11-1 – got the vote. (Stop and consider that for a moment. The national champion in college football was determined by…a vote, which the current arrangement is a queer vestige of.) There was little chance that a Kansas or an Oregon would make a bid for national glory over Texas and USC. You could count on some kind of consensus, or at least an orderly difference of two opinions, at the end of the year.
The current bowl system takes this highly unequal power-distribution for granted, even though it is now gone. This year’s champ, LSU, almost didn’t make it into the national title game because it had two losses. That’s right. A winning percentage of .833, coming out of the toughest conference in the nation. The shame. Only in Div. I college football is a winning percentage below .900 thought to disqualify you from title consideration. But high schools are producing so many good college prospects these days, so many fanatically groomed and conditioned athletes, that the top programs can’t horde them all. And serious coaching talent is spread all over the place. This means that the best team in the country may well have two losses come December. Or maybe, a decade from now, three. The only way to know for sure which team really is the best, in the future-is-now world where college football has the disorderliness of actual competition, is to have four or eight or twelve teams play it out, on the field.
/Only in Div. I college football is a winning percentage below .900 thought to disqualify you from title consideration./
You say “only in…” as though being different means being inferior. I love this aspect of college football wherein a single loss to Stanford can ruin (or nearly ruin) USC’s chances at a national championship.
/This means that the best team in the country may well have two losses come December./
The best team in the country (11-0 or 12-0) can also goof up or have a 1-game injury of a key player and lose a game in the early playoffs. A decent but not great team (8-3 or 9-3) can have a streak of luck in the playoffs. It doesn’t strike me as obvious that the latter is more “deserving” of a championship than a former.
Playoffs determine only who had the best team of a selected pool of teams in the last few games of the season. That’s a fine measure much of the time, but it’s not the only one that can ever be used. I must prefer the current system to a playoff system wherein a team can shrug off a loss by saying to themselves “Eh, we can still make the playoffs”.
(Yes, I agree that there are good arguments against the current system. The best is a few years back when there were four undefeated teams. That’s why I’d be amenable to a 4+1 arrangement so that if a team manages to win all its games it has a shot, but any team that loses could have had its shot at the national title simply by not losing.)
— R. Alex · Jan 9, 05:35 PM · #
>A decent but not great team (8-3 or 9-3) can have a streak of luck in the playoffs.
This could be another way of saying that a team improved during the year – a development that is rewarded in other season schemes. This is one of the things I don’t understand about the “every game counts” argument in favor of the current system. With a playoff, early bad luck or injuries wouldn’t count you out as it does in the current system, if you, well, treat every game as if it counts for the rest of the season.
— Matt Feeney · Jan 9, 08:00 PM · #
<i>With a playoff, early bad luck or injuries wouldn’t count you out as it does in the current system, if you, well, treat every game as if it counts for the rest of the season.</i>
Rankings are weighted towards the late season, though I’m not convinced that they should be. Why should early season injuries and foul-ups count less than late season ones? Why have games wherein one team or the other can go in thinking that it won’t be the end of the world if they lose this game if they can regroup at the end of the season when you can have every game be of earth-shattering importance? LSU lost to Arkansas and still got a shot, but as far as they were concerned they were playing for their entire season that game. Same with Kentucky. Same with all of the schools.
Plus, under the current system, even if you’re out of the running you still have a shot at a pretty big reward: a BCS game. Then every game matters towards that end. There are maybe a half-dozen programs that playing in a BCS game wouldn’t be a huge deal, though not as huge a deal as a national championship of course. Only after you’re knocked out of contention to that do you have significantly less to play for.
— R. Alex · Jan 11, 12:01 AM · #