In an op-ed for USA Today, BCS Head Bill Hancock lays out his defenseof the BCS, arguing that the system worked. He’s dead wrong, and either doesn’t get it or doesn’t care. The system didn’t work because teams like Boise State, if they had finished undefeated, or TCU, who DID finish undefeated, don’t get a shot at the national championship.
[ADDENDUM BY BRENDAN: Stunningly, Hancock flatly contradicts this, asserting that Boise State would have played in the national title game if they’d won out — an obvious lie. We don’t know, we’ll never know, whether Boise would have, say, beaten out Auburn for the #2 spot if Boise had beaten Nevada and the Tigers had lost to Alabama, then beaten South Carolina for the SEC title. But that scenario isn’t even what Hancock posits. He simply asserts that Boise was, as things stood, in line for the title game until they lost, which is just not true. Either Auburn or Oregon also needed to lose, and they didn’t. So Boise (like TCU) was out of luck, win or lose. –ed.]
After discussing Boise, Hancock then cites TCU getting to play in the Rose Bowl as vindication for the BCS, without even mentioning that TCU might also like a chance to win the national title. Granted, the trip to Pasadena is great for Horned Frogs fans, but let’s not kid ourselves that they wouldn’t rather be facing off in Glendale for a shot at the crystal football.
The inherent flaws in the system have led many to cry out for a full 16-team playoff like that which is played in the lower division. While I understand their frustration and motivation, these people are just as wrong as Hancock. A 16-team playoff would kill or severely maim the bowls, and while it’s fun to make fun of the “Beef O’Brady Bowl” and such, the simple fact is that bowls ARE an important and historical part of college football. They are good for teams, for fans, and for the cities that put them on. I’m not saying having 35 bowls is necessary, mind you, I think that’s a little much, but games like the Rose Bowl, the Cotton Bowl, the Fiesta Bowl, etc. are great, classic games that bring a lot to the table.
So how can we avoid harming the bowls while also improving the system to allow teams like TCU a shot at the title? The answer is a limited playoff. Here are two solutions that could work.
1. The Plus One (aka 4-team playoff)
A plus one has been talked about for years now. Essentially, match the top 4 teams in two bowl games, then take the winners into the national championship. I think that’s a step in the right direction, but I’d modify it a little to make it more appealing to the Bowls.
First, instead of taking the top 4 teams, you take the Top 4 conference champions. Apologies to Stanford, but if Boise State had finished undefeated along with TCU, I’d rather see them get a shot, even if Stanford had been ranked higher than one or both of the unbeaten non-AQ teams. As things finished this year, you’d have Auburn, Oregon, TCU, and Wisconsin. Yes, it sucks for Ohio State and Michigan State, who finished tied atop the Big Ten, but that’s the Big Ten’s fault for their scheduling decisions (and it’s a problem that will disappear next season anyway, when they go to 12 teams). If you don’t win your conference, you shouldn’t get a shot at the national championship. A provision can be made that if an independent team ranks higher than at least one conference champion they get the spot, but that’s a detail to be worked out. Or maybe it’s just the downside of being independent and those teams need to join a conference if they want a shot. Whatever the case may be, the main point is, you pick the top four teams, excluding non-champions.
Second, rather than playing in bowl games, the elimination round is played the week after the conference championship games at the home sites of the two highest-ranked teams. This year that would put Wisconsin @ Auburn and TCU @ Oregon.
Third, the winners of those two games go on to play in the national championship. The runner-up teams are then placed in a designated Bowl game against each other, either it can rotate between the BCS sites, or alternatively you designate a Bowl (I recommend the Cotton) in advance, so that ONE of those teams finishes the season with a win. Or, if the Bowls would prefer, you could release the two runners up to the at-large pool and let the bowls choose at this point instead, although this delays planning for most of the bowls by a week and might be too difficult logistically.
This scenario solves most of the problems everyone has with the existing systems. It allows the BCS to continue without acquiescing to a full playoff, and the bowls to continue as well.
There are some problems with this, however. There is a possibility, however small, that 5+ teams could go undefeated (like in 2004-05 and 2009-10), meaning that even a plus-one isn’t enough to give everyone a shot. However, the odds of this are pretty slim, especially with more conferences moving to conference championship matchups. The more likely scenario is a number of 1-loss teams battling for some or all of the four slots. The system is certainly not perfect, but it’s much better than what exists now. But what about an 8-team elimination scenario?
2. The 8-team playoff
There is not much difference here than the four team setup, you simply add an extra week and have two rounds of higher-seed-hosted playoffs. After the first week, where you have four games, you are basically at the 4 team-model suggested above. However, the extra week necessitates a few extra considerations.
For one, it would push bowl decisions even further out. While one week might not be too bad, two weeks is really stretching it. In this scenario, I’d say you release the week one runners-up to the bowl pool, and the runners-up after week two are in a designated game against each other. That lets the rest of the bowls make decisions early on.
Another question is how do you pick the 8 teams. The same 4 highest ranked conference winners continues to make sense, but do you really give a slot to the next 4 highest ranked conferences winners? This year that would include the following:
1. Auburn (SEC)
2. Oregon (Pac10)
3. TCU (MWC)
5. Wisconsin (Big Ten)
7. Oklahoma (Big 12)
10. Boise State (WAC) or 15. Nevada (WAC) depending on how they decide to designate their champion as higher rank or head-to-head. (Note that these teams actually finished in a three-way tie with #24 Hawaii, with everyone going 1-1 against each other, hence the uncertainty.)
13. Virginia Tech (ACC)
25. UCF (C-USA)
Does VaTech or UCF deserve the shot over Ohio State or Stanford? Although I’d still say win your conference or you don’t deserve the spot, I can understand how a close runner-up might be a better choice than a team like UCF. So, as a compromise, top 6 conference champs, and two at-large picks, one of which is given to an independent team if they finish with 10 or more wins — otherwise it goes to the top 2 highest ranked non-conference champs.
This plan has more flexibility for edge cases involving multiple unbeaten or 1 loss teams, but it also leaves enough room for the bowls to continue without pushing the schedule back too far or requiring more dramatic changes like 11-game seasons or starting in August.
I prefer the four-team setup, as I think it is enough of a fix without going to far, but I think an 8-team setup is still reasonable and doable. I continue to believe that a full 16-team playoff is both unnecessary (do we really think that many teams legitimately have a claim at being “the best” after a full season?), and causes too many issues regarding scheduling, bowls, etc.
I think it’s gotta be either some form of a plus-one, or else a full 16-team playoff. I don’t think the middle ground of an 8-team playoff makes sense. It has too many of the negative side effects of the 16-team playoff to be acceptable to most opponents of that playoff, while at the same time failing to satisfy those who believe that a 16-team playoff is necessary to “settle it in the field.” For instance, it is very easy to imagine an 8-team playoff still excluding an undefeated champion of, say, the MAC, particularly if you’re only taking the top 6 champs + 2 at-larges.
As much of a zealous playoff advocate as I’ve been in the past, I can truly see both sides of this argument (between a plus-one and a 16-team playoff). I think a plus-one might be acceptable if coupled with a few changes to scheduling rules. For instance, either an outright ban on FCS games, or else an explicit and substantial penalty in the BCS formula for playing such games. That said, there would need to be some provision to deal with situations like Arizona State this year, where a team is basically cornered into playing an FCS team because somebody backs out of a scheduling contract at the last minute. The NCAA might need to actually get involved in the process of scheduling in a more substantial way — I don’t know. Anyway, the point is, you need to incentivize the big-conference teams to stop playing FCS teams, and instead schedule quality mid-majors, so we don’t have situations where a team is, say, an undefeated MAC champion, yet ranked #12 because their schedule sucked because they couldn’t schedule anybody. If we’re going to steer clear of a full playoff to “preserve the regular season,” then we need to make the regular season more meaningful. We need those 12 games to really give us a valid basis for comparison, instead of many teams wasting several schedule spots every year on games that really give us really no useful data whatsoever.
Second and relatedly, you’ve got to incentivize the big teams teams to play games away from home. I think perhaps a rule should be imposed that, to be eligible for any bowl or playoff game, you MUST have played at least one true road game, and one additional road or neutral game. (Again, some provision is needed for genuine, last-minute schedule snafus.) I don’t think an SEC team that goes 4-0 at home in the non-conference against lower-tier Sun Belt and FCS teams should just be able to waltz into a plus-one bowl, ahead of a 12-0 MAC or WAC or C-USA champ that didn’t get the chance to prove itself, on the basis of a 7-1 conference record. More needs to be done to make regular-season scheduling more fair if we’re going to limit ourselves to four championship contenders.
It would also be great to see the NCAA, or the BCS, or the conferences, or somebody step in and play a more active role in explicitly setting up good matchups (as opposed to merely disincentivizing bad ones). Why not a regular-season “Pac-10 / SEC challenge” along the same lines as we see in basketball? Why not a “BracketBusters for football,” pitting the top mid-majors against each other? And, best of all, how about a David-vs.-Goliath series of some sort, giving us regular-season matchups between top mid-majors and top BCS teams? Again, the bottom line, is we need to make the regular season more meaningful — and more truly “national” — if we’re going to continue to operate on the belief that we can select just a small handful of teams out of 120, based on the information provided by those 12 regular season games about who’s good and who’s not, who’s championship-worthy and who’s not. That’s a very small sample of games, and we can’t afford to be wasting some of them on b.s. “guarantee games” and the like.
P.S. I hope you don’t mind the lengthy addendum I added to your post. I wanted to make that point about Hancock in a blog post of my own, but you beat me to it, so I figured I’d just add it here. 🙂
P.P.S. Re: playing FCS teams, to address the concerns of state legislators who like to see games such as Iowa vs. Northern Iowa and Arizona State vs. Northern Arizona, perhaps a provision could be added for “exhibition games” the week before the season starts, which don’t count for anything. The only problem, of course, is that voters would inevitably consider such games in their preseason rankings, which, as we all know, matter greatly to later-season rankings.
(And I don’t think it’s helpful to suggest “no rankings until midseason,” since, first of all, the powers-that-be don’t control the AP, and as long as there’s one preseason poll, others will tend to mimic it, as we’ve seen with the Harris Poll, which starts at midseason yet never looks substantially different from the other polls when it does come out … and secondly, even if you did eliminate formal preseason polls, you’d still have countless power rankings and whatnot on the Internet, and individual voters will still be forming impressions with their preseason expectations in mind … bottom line, there is no way to force voters not to bake preseason expectations into their rankings.)
Perhaps the exhibition games should be explicitly FBS vs. FCS only, so voters would be more inclined to actually ignore them, all of them, across the board — and in the unusual case where an FBS team loses, which is the only thing likely to really dent preseason expectations, the losing team is probably no good anyway, so it doesn’t matter. Although, but cf., Virginia Tech this year.
Anyway, I’m just brainstorming here, because I know eliminating those sorts of in-state games would pose a problem for an outright ban on FBS-FCS games, and it would be unfair to impose an explicit penalty for playing those games if stupid state legislators are forcing certain teams to play them.
Brendan, one of the examples that you probably picked at random has more to it. I would wager that other I-AA* teams are in the same position.
If Northern Iowa can’t play I-A teams, Northern Iowa will not have an athletics program five years later. The Iowa Board of Regents has made it abundantly clear that it’s not happy with giving UNI’s and ISU’s athletic programs any state money at all, because Iowa is able to function without it. (Three words: Big Ten Network.)
http://beyondthearc.nbcsports.com/2010/09/14/northern-iowa-may-cut-its-athletic-department/
Iowa State is opening with UNI for five of the next seven years because UNI needs the money. (And UNI occasionally wins these, so ISU’s in a lose-lose situation.) The situation may become/is dire enough that UNI will have to hire itself out as a sacrificial lamb for another I-A team just to pay the bills.
The Legislature does not mandate that UNI play Iowa or Iowa State. The Legislature DID mandate that Iowa play Iowa State because Iowa wasn’t going to otherwise. (They need that slot to play a “quality opponent,” you see. And by that, of course, I mean someone they can pay for a guaranteed home win.)
*I refuse to engage in that renamed nonsense.
They used to add SOS in which would encourage better matchups, but then it also hurts schools like Boise State who can’t help playing a bunch of crappy teams. I think some sort of rule requiring an away game against a non-conference opponent that is outside ones home state or a given distance would be doable. I think the 1-AA thing is too detrimental to a lot of teams to prohibit.
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