Josh “2-cents Miley”
My Sundays are sacred. I wake up and watch The Sports Reporters. Then I make eggs. I shower, pull something out of the freezer for dinner and start to check my fantasy football line-ups. I bring the television from my bedroom out into the living room so I can watch two games simultaneously from 1-8 p.m. I eat tortilla chips with salsa or queso. I text everybody with updates about their squads’ performance and I live and die with the Packers performance. At 10 p.m. I wrap it all up with an episode of Entourage and call it a great day. Those are Sundays, those are real football days.
I have friends who swear by Saturday football though. Buckeye backers, SEC snobs, USC front runners and Texas trash-talkers. They love the polls, the bands, the crowds and the rivalries. Now as a native Ohioan I must admit, I love to hate “that team from up north,” and seeing the 42-7 final score scroll across the bottom of my television while I watched the Cavs dismantle the Hawks Saturday night did bring an evil grin to my face, but overall college football hasn’t drawn me in for awhile. John Saunders and a select few other sports writers across America still like to say the college game is more exciting than the pros because every game matters. If you lose more than once, you can forget about playing for the national championship, and sometimes you have to be perfect to be in the running. Okay, simple premise, take care of your business and you’ll be rewarded, not to complicated, I dig it. But we all know the problem. When Alabama loses to Florida (yes, they’ll lose) and we have multiple one-loss “powerhouses” vying for a BCS title bid, how is it decided? On the field? Nope, on paper.
There is a genre of television where the parameters of a game are decided on paper and staged to garner the highest ratings, the highest ad dollars, and the outcome, although ultimately left to fold out before our very eyes, is really meaningless. It’s reality television, and that’s all college football is these days thanks to the BCS.
Think about it. Shows like Dancing with the Stars, American Idol, America’s Got Talent and Last Comic Standing all pick the contestants you get to watch, bring back past competitors in the weeks leading up to the finale and award a trophy plus cash prize to the champion. In college football the BCS selection committee picks their Championship game contestants, fills the other BCS Bowl games with the match-ups they think America wants to watch and gives out a crystal football to their champion and a large television revenue share.
Reality television stars have to have larger than life personalities and reality television contestants must be compelling to survive. You know the names even if you don’t watch the shows: Bruno, Sharon, Paula, Randy, The Hoff and of course Simon. In college football there is McGwire, Herbstreet, Musberger, Hammond, Lundquist, and of course Korso. How many rags to riches tales get close to winning American Idol but in the end just get to perform on the finale and not compete? Can you say mid-major getting a BCS birth? What about all the cable reality television where it’s more about backstabbing, getting voted off the show if you under perform and betraying those closest to you to get ahead? Sounds a lot like Rick Rodriguez leaving West Virginia for that team up north, Charlie Weis losing his way to the unemployment line and Nick Saban jumping ship from LSU to Alabama, albeit with a two-year hiatus.
The fact is college football has become nothing more than thirteen weeks of exhibition play followed by appointment viewing determined by popularity rather than actual game play. We’ve all been duped. The joke is on us and we keep going back in droves just like fat people keep going back to their local Krispe Kreme. Well its fat camp for me, I’m boycotting all Saturday football until the January NFL playoffs.
I can here you by the way. Okay asshole, you think you’re so smart, how do we fix it? Obama is in favor of an eight team playoff. Hogwash. That’s not fixing the problem, that’s just repackaging the product. To bring college football back all human interpretation must be taken out of the equation. Plain and simple the play on the field must determine the outcome of a season.
There are currently eleven NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision (formerly known as Division I-A) conferences (ACC, Big 10, Big East, Big 12, C-USA, MAC, MWC, PAC 10, SEC, Sun Belt and WAC) and four Division I-FBS Independent teams (Army, Navy, Notre Dame and Western Kentucky.) First, take the four independents plus six division two schools and make a twelfth conference. Next split the conferences up into two geographical leagues (ACC, Big 10, Big East, MAC, SEC and newly created conference in the East League; Big 12, C-USA, MWC, Pac 10, Sun Belt and WAC in the West League).
After that, it’s uniform scheduling for each conference. Each team in each conference plays two out of conference games, one at home and one on the road, at the beginning of each season before playing in-conference games. Oh, and schools no longer get to schedule their out of conference games. Instead, like the NFL conferences will rotate what other conferences they play. All Big 10 schools play SEC schools in 2009, WAC schools in 2010, C-USA schools in 2001, etc. Opponents are picked by overall records from the previous year with teams playing one game against like competition and one game against inferior/superior competition. So if you went 10-2 last year, expect to play a 2-10 team followed by a 10-2 team to kick off your season.
From here you play nine conference games. At the end of the season the two teams in every conference that have the best records (in and out of conference combined since scheduling is uniform) play one another in a conference title game. The conference title game winners each get a birth in the National Championship Playoff Tree. No wild cards are granted, only 12 teams, all conference champions decided the same way, vie for the national championship. Now it’s single elimination with simple seeding: an East League bracket and a West League bracket. Going first by overall record, than by on the field stats, teams are seeded one to six in each bracket. Playoff Week One sees six games, three in each bracket. Playoff Week Two features two games with the top seeds left in each bracket earning a bye. Playoff Week Three is League Championship Week with two games to decide who plays in the National Championship. Playoff Week four is the title. All told the season becomes 11 to 16 games long. It goes from the Labor Day to New Years and most importantly it’s all decided on the field. Hey Fox, CBS, ABC, NBC and ESPN…think you can sell that to sponsors? I bet my ridiculously small salary that you could!
I can hear the outrage coming from your SEC programmed brain. Why should the WAC get a team in your playoff over an SEC team that is clearly better? To that I say first, win your conference, and second wait a decade and then look at the parity. If you give each conference an equal shot at the title, you give each school equal shot at the title. The Urban Myer’s of the world have a chance to win big in Bowling Green or Utah and no longer have to jump ship to the SEC. Any coach can walk into any living room and say, “Come play for me where our goal is to win our conference and win the title!” Before you know it a Hawaii or an Ohio University becomes a new college playoff power. Boise State makes a deep run. Cinderella actually has a chance to crash the ball instead of just getting a token appearance. Now the title is truly up for grabs and college football is truly exciting no matter where you live.
I understand what I am proposing goes against an entire century’s worth of “tradition” and “conventional wisdom,” or as I see it brainwashing by the powers that be, but you gotta see the forest through the trees my friend. Only in a land of fantasy or fake reality would a team like Notre Dame still be televised nationally so consistently. It’s time for college football to change before it’s too late. Once you see the Wizard for what he is you can’t go back. Once you realize all you’re watching every Saturday is pre-programmed, high-level exhibition reality television in HD, you’ll start doing the girlfriend or wife thing to free up your Sundays. While your alma mater may not like it, what other choice have the greedy bastards given you?
Eat turkey. Go Cavs.
