Collegiate football needs playoff brackets, not BCS formulas 
by Andrew McDermott
December 13, 2011
College football and its bowl games are becoming a joke to me. Bowl games used to be for the prestigious, hard-nosed schools that earned their way into a bowl game. The Cotton Bowl, Gator Bowl, Orange Bowl, Fiesta Bowl, Sugar Bowl and Rose Bowl were all the major bowl games. Nowadays, however, any team with 11 warm bodies on the field can find its way into some bowl game sponsored by some product or company.
Right now some diehard Mississippi State fan is bragging that his team has earned the bowl bid into the Franklin American Mortgage Music City Bowl!! And a crazy Utah State fan is proud that his team has earned a hard-fought bowl bid into the Famous Idaho Potato Bowl!! Honestly, who cares?
These bowl games recently integrated into college football serve only to entertain bored adults who just watched the “X Factor” on an equally boring Tuesday night. Do people really want to watch a game to determine who will finish in 54th place this year when they can watch a championship game between Alabama and LSU?
The BCS (Bowl Championship Series) should stick only to bowl games that carry time-tested prestige. Quite frankly, who cares about the godaddy.com Bowl?
Another thing that bugs me about college football is the BCS’s method for determining matchups. The BCS formula uses three top nationwide polls and a final computer-generated poll to determine which teams play in the Championship Game and also which teams are seeded where.
Since the BCS implementation in 1998, its rankings have been controversial. For example, in the 2003-2004 season, the LSU Tigers won the BCS National Championship. However, the three national polls all voted the USC Trojans as champions. This situation led to both teams being declared co-champions and a new, updated system being installed in the 2004- 2005 season.
This year the LSU Tigers beat Alabama in the regular season, the only game Alabama lost all year. However, Oklahoma State also lost only one game and scored more quality wins than Alabama. So why shouldn't OSU get a chance to play for the big one? Because the BCS says so.
I believe that the BCS is flawed and a playoff system should be instituted for college football. Having a playoff system like the NCAA does now would be a much better way of determining a champion. This system would mean that the No. 1 seeded team would play the No. 16 team and so forth. There would be two sides on the bracket and the winner of the two sides would play each other in the Championship Game. The BCS system now does not compute other factors of a team's performance into its decision. The playoff method would let teams play out the games and perhaps show that the most dominant teams do end up in the Championship Game.
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