Skyhook79;996175 wrote:"The current formula is nothing more than nonsense math and an unsound popular vote that gets polished up by television. Anyone who cares about college football should demand something better.
If we can’t get a playoff, can they at least stop insulting our intelligence? Can we at least get some attempt at sanity?"
Thats all I have been saying about the BCS in a nutshell, except we can and should get a playoff system in place.
There are two different arguments and I'm not even going to get into the "there should be a play-off" because it isn't happening and even if it does, it wouldn't change any seasons past or even this season. Accept that there are going to be two teams in a championship game and the next argument is how to select those teams.
There are some good points about the calculation (and you've made some in the past, as well). But the bottom line is, do the two most deserving teams end up in the championship game in this system? So throw every season out to a selection committee if that is the solution - in what years would they have selected two different teams?
In the common examples, the only one that I believe might have been different was USC over Oklahoma (versus LSU in 2003). That doesn't even mean it would've been the right decision because the argument for them was that they "looked" like the most talented team and the reason they really sat it out was because their schedule was pretty much cake (not that Oklahoma's was great).
In 2001, it isn't a given that Oregon would've been selected over Nebraska because the Pac 10 only had three other teams with a winning record and Oregon lost to one of them (to go along with the nailbiters at the end of the season while Nebraska was pretty much destroying everyone).
For the same reasons that schedule was important in those cases and for the same reasons that schedule would be important to any selection committee that would ever take over, Utah, TCU, and Boise are not valid examples of BCS calculation flaws. They wouldn't have been in a two-team championship game regardless of the selection process. And that is the biggest over-hyped non-tragedy ever used to demonstrate this system's flaws.
Auburn, Cincinnati, and whoever else - none of these teams would have been selected in any other system where a group of people has to determine the two most deserving teams. Even if a basic system such as Ohio's Harbin system was implemented, the same teams would've ended up in the title game because it virtually always comes down to who beat better teams.
So, sure there are some flaws that lead to some quirks (Arizona Western was #30 in one of the computer polls), but if it doesn't change the bottom line there isn't much point in a major overhaul. College football benefits tremendously from the week-to-week interest in the polls, the subsequent debates, and the speculation that is generated from the current setup.
stole this from another forum
