BCS Credibility

Good thing the BCS isn't a farcical joke. It sure would be annoying if college football fans had to sit through a season of fierce and exciting regular season battles only to watch it end in exhibition games and a beauty pageant vote. Thank goodness we get to decide on the field whether one loss USC, one loss Florida, one loss Oklahoma, one loss Texas or undefeated Utah is the better team, cause imagine how illegitimate it would be if voters just had to guess who was better without the teams actually playing. That would suck...oh wait.

Two further BCS thoughts.

One is a significant and entrenched power that supports keeping the current bowl system the way it is, gambling. The elephant in the room that the NCAA would never speak of has huge incentives to keep the current system. Where else are the books and Vegas gonna get this kind of huge action during the dull days of December, regular season basketball? Hockey? Don't kid yourselves, the fact that Vegas, and in rest of the country, the mob get millions of dollars in action bet on craptastic games like a Wake Forest-Navy rematch in the Eagle Bank Bowl is one of the big reasons business as usual hasn't changed. These folks have powerful lobbyists and are one of the constituencies that even president-elect Obama will have trouble overcoming to create a college football playoff. (If you watch these games, you know there are quite a few that don't sell out. It is not the money they're making off of ticket sales that keeps the bowls going.)

Two is how much crummier have the television options for the bowl games gotten. Used to be five, six bowls a day on New Year's Day, so if one game was awful or a blowout at least there were other places to turn for college football. Not so anymore. As greed has ruled the roost, the games have been spread out over more and more days, so when you get a stinker of a Rose Bowl, like this year, where the entire second half was garbage time watching USC, who had won the second quarter alone 24-0, trying to run out the clock, there was nowhere to turn. No other college football game was on!!! Same thing with a somnambulant Orange Bowl, while Virginia Tech and Cincinnati played a dullsville 10-7 first half, in the good old days there would have been another game to surf to, but not anymore. So guess what BCS honks? Here at the Clarion Content offices we surfed away from your boring exhibition game, and we never came back.