The Bowl Championship Sucky Ending
I have a great fondness for the writing and editing of Bryan Curtis, whose (sadly dormant) Middlebrow column at Slate far outshines the other brows they have over there and who commissioned and edited some of my oddest and most ambitious pieces there. It is in the same borderline-perverse spirit in which he had me write a deep appreciation of Jerry Bruckheimer (and in which he himself appreciates Jerry Bruckheimer) that he argues on behalf of the current BCS system in college football in Saturday’s Times Op-Ed page:
The part of the sport to savor is not the finale but the regular season. In college football, every game has the fierce urgency of now. The uncertainty of what lies at the end makes the 12-game gantlet all the more nerve-wracking. Lose once, and your team finds itself at the mercy of the voters and the dreaded computers.
I have to admit that this speaks to a sort of aesthetic weakness of mine – i.e. a weakness for aesthetics as such, as an outlook. Like rigorous formalists, the BCS defenders often invoke the season-as-a-whole, and not a single team’s season but everyone’s. It’s as if a year of college football is to be savored, as an exquisite totality, in a single backward-looking moment of Wordsworthian tranquility. One, apparently, recalls the many small tensions and surprises – Penn state’s surprising run, USC’ early season loss to Oregon St. Ah, the drama of the roiling whole. From the primordial moment when everyone is 0-0, the single organism of NCAA Divison IA football struggles to reorganize itself so as to reveal whether one team might Go Undefeated.
But, to recur to a different sort of aesthetic discourse, this argument is ideological. It rests on a strenuously maintained nostalgia that is blind to the actual workings of the system. In many ways, the current system is not just competitively but aesthetically retrograde. For starters, the big argument that the current system emphasizes the whole season misses the damage that the current system does to one’s appreciation of the season as a whole. Having lost to Oregon State, former #1 USC has been perversely relegated to also-ran status, despite the fact that others still in contention, primarily Florida and Texas and Oklahoma, have one loss. So, instead of making every game count, the current system shunts almost every game subsequent to a loss into something like the loser’s bracket. (Exceptions apply to teams that have the good fortune to lose their one game later in the season, when there are fewer or no remaining undefeated teams, which means they drop fewer spots in the polls and retain some hope of getting into the final game.) I know this season-death from having followed Michigan football much of my life. A system in which teams with one loss can play themselves into the four- or six- or eight-team playoff would make every post-loss game a life-or-death affair. It would, in other words, make the whole season count for contenders who lost early. In a playoff system, people would still be talking about football west of Norman, Oklahoma.
The current system also undervalues season-long improvement. Teams get better over 12 games. An early loss that sends a team below the top 10, and then a change of outlook, or a substitution at a key position, and the team goes on a tear and shows itself to be truly elite team by mid-November and…never mind, because it was never able to make up the ground lost in its initial demotion and make it into the subjective top two. How’s that for appreciating the season as a whole? (And, wouldn’t it be great if, instead of gazing upon this atemporal specter of the season-as-a-whole, as if it were a painting, we could provide the season with a real climactic momentum, as if it were a play (or a movie or a novel). Maybe when viewed as a painting, the BCS season has a certain charm, but when viewed as belonging to a narrative form, it kinda sucks. It has, as you might say while walking out of a movie, a sucky ending. It’s often at least either arbitrary or boring, and its often both.)
The current system also fetishizes the Undefeated Season. This alone is a good index of the ideological nature of pro-BCS sentiment. It is a vestige of the old days when only a small number of schools could even imagine contending for a national title, and when the schedules of national powers were filled with gut games and one or two true challenges. A perverse result of this fixation is that we are forced to consider whether an undefeated team from a sub-elite conference – which now includes the Big Ten – should have a spot in the title game despite the fact that nobody actually thinks its one of the two best teams in the country. This Perfect Season fetish is merely a habit, which has become a bad habit. Elevating the perfect season when nominally elite (i.e. BCS) conferences, and thus schedules, vary widely in quality is an anachronism, if it ever made sense. If Penn State had not lost to Iowa, after having squeaked by Ohio State, who was blown out of the water by (now beside-the-point) USC, they (Penn State), as the only remaining undefeated team (assuming that Alabama will get destroyed by Florida in the SEC title game), would have a great shot at getting into the national title game, despite the fact that nobody ever thought they were one of the five best teams in the country. Then, in the national title game, they would be blown out.
No wonder Bryan says we shouldn’t bother savoring the season finale.
One of the best arguments I’ve ever seen against the stupid “season as a whole” nonsense.
I’m an OU fan, but I think it’s ludicrous that who goes to the Big 12 championship is going to be a popularity contest. It hurt me to watch Stoops running up the score last night, but what other choice did he have? He needed the style points to move past Texas in the polls. I’d rather settle it in a playoff.
— Jay · Nov 24, 01:06 AM · #
Who cares about the season? What the current mania for playoffs and bowl selection does is diminish the role of the game. Why do we have to know who is #1 at the end of the season? What’s important is whether MSU beat U of Mich, or whether Purdue beat Indiana, etc. The game is what’s important, not this other nonsense.
— The Reticulator · Nov 24, 05:04 AM · #
Though it puts me afoul of both President-Elect Obama & Coach Joe Paterno (among others), I don’t think much of the prospect of a college football playoff – not that this BCS nonsense is any better. I’m not sure I have any good reasons to support this position. What I do have, I suppose, is a fetishistic attachment to amateurism, and to the rites & idiosyncracies of the game. I realize that’s naive, given the advertising-alumni donation complex that drives college football nowadays.
Also – while I was almost glad to see PSU taken out of the championship talk, I wouldn’t be so quick to put USC ahead of them. Yes, USC blew out OSU, and PSU squeaked by them – but USC beat a version of the Buckeyes that did not feature Chris Wells and had Todd Boeckman as QB. PSU also shellacked Oregon State, who had something to do with USC’s current absence from the national title conversation. Hopefully a PSU-USC Rose Bowl meeting will render the need for further speculation otiose.
— CPM · Nov 24, 03:36 PM · #
CPM: unfortunately, it looks like Penn State will play Oregon State again, so we won’t get to answer that argument (thanks again to Oregon State removing USC from the BCS conversation, they also own the Pac-10 tiebreaker) – I guess we’ll get to see how Oregon State has improved, though.
As a Penn State fan, I wasn’t so happy to see PSU taken out of the conversation – although I wanted to see them attain the Undefeated Season, even if they weren’t put in the BCS title game. But I’m tired of the Big Ten being castigated for Ohio State’s failings. Penn State is not Ohio State, and had they gone undefeated, should have been given a big place in the conversation. I’m hoping for a very boring title game – one that proves to the sports yakking class that removing Penn State from the title game would not guarentee a great game, as the assumption seems to be. But then, I kinda hope for boring blowouts for all BCS title games until we get some sort of playoffs.
— B. Minich · Nov 24, 06:21 PM · #
B. Minich: Don’t get me wrong – that “almost” in “I’m almost glad …” is carrying a lot of weight. But while I couldn’t agree more that Penn State shouldn’t be castigated for the failings of Tressel-ball on The National Stage, consider me skeptical (but willing to be convinced) that our Nittany Lions could’ve hung with the best of the SEC or Big-12 this year. Somehow I also manage to think that PSU isn’t getting nearly the kind of respect they deserve, and there’s no way Utah or USC should be ranked ahead of them. That really is passing the sins of the Bukeyes onto the Lions’ shoulders.
But I think USC-PSU is the better match-up, and the one more likely to give PSU some cred on The National Stage should they win, and so would rather see the Trojans in the Rose Bowl—all the while realizing that’s not the likely scenario.
— CPM · Nov 24, 08:19 PM · #
Hey, the Buckeyes beat the Wolverines and the Crew won the MLS championship in the same weekend. Who cares about bowls, today, anyway. :-)
— Julana · Nov 24, 11:31 PM · #