A few weeks Penguin books sent Balloon-Juice reader J a copy of “Death to the BCS” to review as part of the new Balloon-Juice reader review program. Here is the review reader J wrote:
Death to the BCS is a hard-hitting and fact-filled expose that provides a sound argument for replacing the Bowl Championship Series with a playoff. Actually, the authors provide a series of arguments, presented one per chapter, for killing the widely unpopular BCS. In place of the BCS they propose putting the 11 conference champions plus 5 at-large teams into playoffs, with the higher seed having home-field advantage for the first three rounds and a neutral site for the championship game — which would be a real championship game, between two teams that had won the right to play in the game by winning three playoff games.
Dan Wetzel, Josh Peter, and Jeff Passan don’t pull any punches in beating up on “the Cartel,” the commissioners of the six conferences that control the BCS. Page by page, chapter by chapter, they take the often absurd arguments that the Cartel uses to defend the BCS and turn them into mincemeat.
Perhaps the strongest argument for ending the misery of fans of undefeated teams that are shut out of the BCS title game and of football followers around the country who see the magic of March Madness and the use of football playoffs at other levels of the college game and wonder ‘Why can’t we have that?’ is one of simple economics: A playoff system would generate piles of dollars, far beyond the total provided by the current bowl games. The authors argue that the Cartel opposes change because the current system gives them control over a small pile of money, whereas a playoff system would divide a much larger pie more equally.
But there are many failed arguments for retaining the BCS and then authors address them one by one, devoting chapters to such topics as the disincentives that schools have today to schedule real competition for non-conference games, thus diluting the regular season that the Cartel professes to defend, and the many flaws in both the human polls and the computer rankings that together determine the BCS standings.
The authors recognize that there is no going back to the pre-BCS days, when there were fewer bowls, nor do they want to eliminate bowl games or use the current bowl system to host the playoff games that they propose. Instead, they lay out, early in the book, a sound alternative — a 16 team playoff system — that would be welcomed by fans everywhere and that would crown a true champion.
Death to the BCS is informative and carefully argued. Wetzel, Peter, and Passan peel back the curtain and reveal the truth about the BCS, which is even more ugly than most of us have imagined — which is saying something. Read this book and you’ll know why the BCS must die (if you don’t already), plus you’ll have a stack of arguments to support the change the major college football is dying to see.
KG
wait, so they want the bowls (without conference champs and five other teams) and the bowls?
I don’t think I’ve ever heard of this idea. I am intrigued.
Davis X. Machina
With those top two college teams going up into the NFL, and the bottom two teams from the NFL being required to start up a state university to support themselves, right?
Like proper football.
BGinCHI
@Davis X. Machina: Genius.
I want to teach at Oakland Raiders University.
freelancer
Fuck yeah. 2 Blackshirts 3 and outs and Helu has a 66yd Touchdown Run the first play from scrimmage. Go Huskers!
Also, Nebraska has a way of fucking up in the BCS in truly unique ways. It needs to change.
The Dangerman
A lot of things could blow it up this year.
If Boise runs the table and somehow gets jobbed in the polling or the computers, that might be enough.
If Boise plays TCU for the Championship, that WILL blow it up. If the #1’s keep sucking on the tailpipe (I hate the Trojans, but I predict they take Oregon tonight in a very high scoring affair, and Auburn is a fraud), that could very well happen.
Davis X. Machina
@BGinCHI:
An NFL franchise would already have the requisite money, and would permit bold new experiments in post-secondary education.
The two Enormous State Universities freed from the onerous duty of providing professional football to their states could rebate the money saved to their taxpayers, or spend it on infrastructure, health care, or, you know, public post-secondary education.
Al Davis v. the AAUP — that‘s entertainment
Warren Terra
Isn’t discussing the nature of the championship system for professional “collegiate” football rather ignoring the elephant in the room? All this talk of fairness and revenue fails to address the real issue: first-tier, televised NCAA-sanctioned sport is a massive travesty, at best irrelevant the supposed academic purposes of the schools involved, a cruel betrayal and calculating exploitation of the vast majority of the athletes involved, all of whom are unpaid or hearly so and too many of whom will never graduate or will receive a farcical, useless, and likely undeserved degree (not to mention the much worse toll inflicted on those who don’t make it far enough to be exploited thus way), and is hugely expensive and often money-losing (especially because the budgets are usually fraudulent, with alumni donations credited and capital, maintenance, and other associated costs not deducted).
“College” football is a fantastic minor league, but until its corrupt and corrupting ties to the colleges is broken it will remain an essentially tragic institution, however they decide who wins the championship.
BGinCHI
@The Dangerman: Auburn’s QB is very good. That could take them a long way this year.
The Dangerman
I like the idea of 16 teams, but I would have all games at neutral sites (just like March Madness). The preliminary games would replace some of the early bowls that no one but students and the most rabid alumni give a shit about (the games where two roughly .500 teams play).
I’d trade all the New Years day bowls for the championship game that day, rotating between the same 4 cities as now.
BGinCHI
@Warren Terra: Yeah, but there are cheerleaders.
ChrisB
@BGinCHI: I want to go to Oakland Raiders University.
The Dangerman
@BGinCHI:
Oh, 100% agreement there; he’s a stud. I heard some commentary last week that said he’s a better athlete than Bo Jackson, which is unfathomable.
That said, they should have already gone down and someone will pick them off. Guarantee Alabama gets them.
BGinCHI
@The Dangerman: You’re probably right. This year has that feel to it. It’s going to be a rollercoaster right to the end.
Not sure if BSU and TCU have any tough games. Does UO?
As long as ND keeps losing, I’ll be happy. But that poor kid who got killed filming practice….nothing funny about that. Really, really tragic and stupid of them to have had him up there like that. The winds were crazy all week.
arguingwithsignposts
Good review, J.
I definitely have a hard time imagining it’s more ugly than I perceive it to be, but like Peak Wingnut, Peak BCS will never be reached, I fear.
fucen tarmal
until college football programs do enough with the 12 games they already have, they really ought to not ask for more.
i’m not in favor of either a playoff or the bcs, though the bcs doesn’t bother me so much, though i do have fond memories of bowl scouts in loud blazers…when i was a kid , that was my dream job.
the reality is, “the cartel” can’t tell the truth, because you, the idiot sportswriters, etc can’t handle the truth…the top players on the top teams are unlike the other players at every other division, and every other sport in two co-equal respects.
1)they are looking to turn pro and get paid, and 2)football is an atrition sport where injuries are not just common, they are expected, serious injuries, if one plays in enough games.
so mindless sportswriters can warble, and people who have never known a college football player with pro prospects, but are fans of having something else to watch on tv, and have no greater connection to the programs than that, can stomp their feet…but the deeper you look into it, and for more reasons than the players future job prospects, its just a bad bad bad idea.
Brien Jackson
And this is why people like me; waning college football fans who don’t really care what arbitrary system they use for picking their national champion, get annoyed by the perennial playoff pushers.
It’s great if you want to push for a playoff, but for God’s sake stop wasting everyone’s time and attention with wildly unrealistic ideas like this. I mean, there’s at least 3 red flags that would go off here with anyone mildly familiar with the internal college football dynamic.
stuckinred
The Dawgs are driving me fucking crazy!
freelancer
Wow. The Huskers are firing on ALL cylinders. If they played like this all the time, they’d be unbeatable. Against anybody.
arguingwithsignposts
@Brien Jackson:
“The internal college football dynamic” is that every other division besides the pansies in Div I FBS (whatever-the-hell-they-are-calling-it-these-days) *plays a playoff* and does so without whinging and making excuses.
MattR
@KG: They are not alone. Not that my idea has gotten any press (probably because I have not tried to share it), but my proposal is to shorten the regular season to 12 games including any conference championship then have a 16 team playoff. The first round would be in early December right after the regular season played at the higher ranked school. The last three rounds would be in January and would utilize the BCS bowls as well as a couple of the larger non-BCS bowls (ie. Gator, Capitol One). All the other bowls would remain and would issue invitations after the first round of playoffs, so the small conference champions who get slaughtered in the first round of the playoffs would still get to play in a bowl.
stuckinred
@MattR: The regular season is already 12 games.
Michael
Isn’t there already a 12 game playoff? With the current schedule, you lose, you’re pretty much eliminated from contention (yes, there have been a few teams to play in the BCS Championship that had a loss or two). Just make the schedule better. No more preying on I-AA teams or 8th place teams from the ACC or WAC. Increase the difficulty (or decrease the advantage of beating a very weak team), and the benefit of “winning to weak vs losing to strong” disappears.
Brien Jackson
@arguingwithsignposts:
And they play their playoff before the FBS regular season finishes. So unless you find a way to get around either the problem of getting programs to agree to cut off 3 games or so from the season and give up all the revenue, or get university Presidents to drop the “academics comes first” pretension and allow a playoff round to be scheduled during finals week, a 16 game playoff is a completely unrealistic proposal, and anyone who’s been following this argument for more than 15 minutes while doing more than just whining about the cartel knows it.
The Dangerman
@BGinCHI:
Definitely a coaster ride today; right now, Huskers are taking care of Missouri and Spartans are tanking in Iowa. Assuming my prediction of UO going down is right (and too bad for them SC has been cheating massively for years – i.e., cheaters could keep them out of the title game), Boise and TCU could lead in the BCS standings in a couple weeks. Which will hack off just about everyone….
MattR
@stuckinred: Yep. Hence the “including any conference championship” part. For all those conferences with a championship game they can only have an 11 game regular season (though I would allow them to create 12th game matchups for the entire conference if they wanted).
@Brien Jackson:
I think my propisal gets around those issues pretty well without doing anything so drastic.
The Dangerman
@BGinCHI:
Someone needs to be fired if not indicted for reckless endangerment for that one. Winds were not only crazy, but predicted to be crazy. Very sad, indeed.
stuckinred
@MattR: Sorry, screaming at my bulldogs has impaired my reading comp!
arguingwithsignposts
@Brien Jackson:
Shorter: Ain’t gonna happen because we’re just in it for the money.
I have no problem with that (well, I do, but i realize I have absolutely no way to register that displeasure with the greedy assholes who run Big Time College Football), but they should just be honest about it.
stuckinred
@BGinCHI: It still looked windy as the Illini stomped the Boilers!
BGinCHI
@stuckinred: There’s a tautology there somewhere….
stuckinred
@BGinCHI: Hence the grad work in adult ed as opposed to englich.
BGinCHI
@stuckinred: @stuckinred: I think the Boilers have lost a combined 100+ to 10 in the last two weeks.
So proud.
Looking forward to basketball season.
Brien Jackson
@arguingwithsignposts:
Frankly it wouldn’t bother me if the universities would stop pretending it was something it isn’t. I think that’s the most galling thing of all. But people just ignore this logistical issue and then get mad when you bring it up, even though it comes up anytime there’s a semi-serious proposal. This is what I mean, people who write books like this are just bitching at the wind by refusing to deal with reality.
On the other hand, it’s kind of hypocritical to use “more equitable distribution of money” as a reason for a playoff and then propose eliminating regular season games to facilitate it, considering that would cost programs who don’t make the playoffs often a lot of money.
fucen tarmal
@arguingwithsignposts:
i bet you lived most of your life shoved in one locker or another. the low end universities you rep don’t attract the caliber of athlete, they don’t run as fast, hit as hard, and the players, with rare exception, have no future as players to worry about…only a complete pussy would suggest that its a matter of manhood…lets see those players from the low tiers hold up for 4 games in a row against top competition. you clearly don’t understand the difference.
BGinCHI
@stuckinred: I stopped rooting for UGA years ago.
They should just post their final record as 6-6 or 7-5 every year before the season and skip the games. Just tailgate.
stuckinred
@BGinCHI: I was born in Urbana, my folks and I graduated from Illinois and I will always be an Illini. Any kind of win, especially these days, is a good win.
stuckinred
@BGinCHI: Grump! They were not tailgaiting on North Campus like they have the past few years when you were here. It got so out of control that they effectively shut it down. You obviously have not been following them for the past ten years:
The Dangerman
@The Dangerman:
I should clarify my remark, given everyone “cheats” (I’ve personally seen things at UCLA that must come at least close to the line of the rules – which wouldn’t be so bad except UCLA has sucked for years).
USC just took it to far greater depths than others have done (if it isn’t obvious, UCLA Grad here).
Chup
I don’t know anything about the other writers, but Jeff Passan is only slightly brighter than Jonah Goldberg.
So, I think I’ll pass …
Brien Jackson
I’m just going to toss this out there, because it’s a point I like to make to all of my friends who think Boise has it so rough. There was just a round of conference movement where the Pac 10 talked about adding like 6 teams. Did anyone here reports of Boise trying to get themselves in? The Big 12 is losing 2 schools next year. Are Boise State or TCU lobbying to take their places?
Grumpy Code Monkey
Do we really need a national champion in college football?
Seriously, do we *really need* to determine a national champion in college football? Whether it’s through the BCS or a real playoff system, why does it *matter*?
BGinCHI
@stuckinred: That’s ok, I still like you.
I’m feeling compassionate what with the rally in DC and all.
I’m a Big Ten loyalist, so I root for the Illini against all external comers.
stuckinred
@BGinCHI: Oskewowow! Where do you teach?
BGinCHI
@Grumpy Code Monkey: This is what the grumpy old man yells in a musical right before the beautiful young woman sings a plucky, let’s-get-motivated song.
Brien Jackson
@Grumpy Code Monkey:
Because there’s books to sell and columns to write when you don’t have anything to original to write.
BGinCHI
@stuckinred: NEIU.
We’re on the NW side of the city. Most diverse uni in the Midwest, commuter, amazing working class (and many first-gen college goers) student body, average age 27. It’s a really great place to teach. I just wish we had a bigger budget.
WyldPirate
@The Dangerman:
dude, you’re smoking fucking crack.
Auburn is for real. Cam Newton is the best RB in college FB and he’s the damn QB.
Oregon takes USC and that cocky fuck Lane Kiffin. The Ducks have perhaps the fastest college FB team I’ve ever seen
John O
@The Dangerman:
This is pretty much a dream day in college football to me, and you said it well. I think OU is going down tonight, too, and I want to see TCU and Boise State beat a big guy. I think they can. Winning is self-fulfilling.
BGinCHI
@WyldPirate: Agreed.
Auburn, OU, and TCU. Then we’ll see who amongst the 1-loss teams got better for having lost. Some do and some don’t.
Looks like MSU has finally shown its colors.
Resident Firebagger
I haven’t really followed college football since the early 80s, when Rick Telander wrote “50-Yard Lie” and BYU won the “championship” by going undefeated in the WAC and edging Michigan in a down season. Pro wrestling has a more honest and coherent way of determining champions, and I’m dead serious about that.
I’ve read Wetzel’s columns on college football, and I certainly respect his effort to elevate this issue. But I think the book has the wrong alternative.
Sixteen teams is too many for a football playoff. And, unlike basketball, it would be a joke to let every conference champion in the field. Just start with eight teams (maybe you could expand to 12) with automatic berths to the SEC, Big 12, Big Ten, Pac Ten and, I guess, ACC champions. Ideally, only conference champs should get in from the big-boy conferences. That leaves the other three at-large spots for the Boise States of the world (and Notre Dame, should they ever be relevant again). All games are at neutral sites.
Start with the last weekend in December. The quarterfinals have maybe one Friday night match-up and a Saturday triple-header. Then, in a nod to Tradition, your Final Four is played on New Year’s Day. Then the national championship game would be the following Friday or Saturday. The old bowl games? They become the new NIT, only people will still care about them for some reason.
That’s it. It’d be the biggest sports event in the country. March Madness + Super Bowl…
The Dangerman
Consecutive post whiplash; anyone know a good virtual chiropractor?
MSU looks like shit; looks like Missouri is going down. I would be far from shocked if Mississipi beat Auburn.
If Boise and TCU lead the BCS standings, look for the Mother of all shenanigans to get one of the Big Boys into the title game.
BGinCHI
@The Dangerman: Or we invade a Middle Eastern country as a diversion.
Does Fox have the BCS champ game?
If so, all military options are on the table.
John O
@Resident Firebagger:
8 is plenty. You have the concept right, but you didn’t say how short the regular seasons would necessarily be.
Dee Loralei
@efgoldman: LOL that incredibly long thread was just last Saturday, dude. I started it after OU lost to Mizzou saying I had always hated the BCS and hoped Boise State and TCU played in the big game, because that would blow the damned thing up. Seemed like most folks agreed it would.
And then we all tossed in our replacement playoff ideas and I vaguely remember we solved all the world’s problems as well. But I was a wee bit tipsy by that time, so my memory is a bit fuzzy. OY.
God, I love college football.
Oh and PS. I’m not saying OU is going to win tonight. I am saying they will have learned from their loss last week and will make an entirely new set of boneheaded mistakes and errors . Stoops knows how to get a team back up. It’s entirely up to the guys emotional make-up whether they stay fixed once they get on the field.
Brien Jackson
@Dee Loralei:
Um, wouldn’t a Boise State-TCU match-up prove that they can win a national championship under the current set-up?
JWL
If a college playoff system was designed to coincide with the NFL playoffs (initial rounds Friday night; championship game the Saturday before the Super Bowl);
And if the US government instituted control of a national bookmaking operation;
The national deficit would disappear within 5 years.
BGinCHI
@JWL: You just wait till Kenny Rogers is President.
Dee Loralei
@Brien Jackson: Yea, but it would piss off the bigboys conferences that none of their teams were allowed, under the current rules, to play for the big game. So they would be the ones in mid-January calling for a new system, one they hope to game to put their schools back in the big game. I was suggesting using the big conferences sense of superiority and entitlement to get them to fight against this system that we have now that almost always stacks the deck in their favor.
It’s a theory.
Jason
Eliminate all intercollegiate football and replace it with extensive intramural sports, nutrition and fitness programs for every student. Let the NFL start a minor league program if they need one so much, the big whining sissies.
stuckinred
@Jason: yea yea , and the public option is right around the corner!
Tom M
Screw changing the BCS. What they need to do is force the NFL, which has all the money they need, to fund a proper minor league system and stop pretending that college football is about any longer about college. Have you seen the graduation rates? They give them 6 years and schools like Fla. St can’t graduate 40%.
HL_guy
Cal Bears… I’m not sure anybody else cares, but Jeff Tedford really should be done. He did a nice job turning the program around ~8 years ago, but he’s getting outcoached week after week. He’s running on fumes. This lopsided losses are piling up. The team has some nice talent, but they’ve been surpassed by other Pac-10 teams that they hammered regularly 2-3 years ago- Stanford, Washington, Oregon, Oregon State. They couldn’t beat ‘SC when they were (both) good, and got embarrassed by them now that they’re not. The offense is unimaginative and the defense looks like they’re on rollerskates half the time. The ‘mentor of qb’s’ has a 5th year guy with zero leadership skills, after finishing a 3-year romance with Nate Longshore that (unsurprisingly) went nowhere. Rant over.
Bill Murray
While the BCS blows goat dicks more than Mickey Kaus, playoffs don’t lead to a true champion any more than the current system, unless one defines a true champion as being determined by a playoff.
Spaghetti Lee
Yes, let’s set up college football with endless playoffs that last for weeks and make the regular season meaningless! It worked so well for hockey and pro basketball.
fbihop
If anyone is honestly defending the bowl system, you’re defending a corrupt system that rewards mediocrity and on which many schools (as we all know many are funded by taxpayer money) lose money on.
The bowl system itself is crap and was only made worse by the BCS where the big conferences end up freezing out the schools from the smaller conferences of the bowls that would actually make money.
And the problem with the current regular season is that it rewards the top teams for playing I-AA teams (or FCS like they call it now) instead of playing good teams from smaller divisions.
It basically rewards teams for scheduling like wusses.
PS: Baseball open thread?
4tehlulz
The only way to know the true champion of college football is through a 256-team tournament.
Antonius
Or college students could spend more time working toward their degrees. Sorry, sometimes the crazy just slips out.
Spaghetti Lee
@fbihop:
Any expanded playoff system rewards mediocrity. Re: 42-40 NBA Teams or 8-8 NFL teams getting into the playoffs. The best example of weeding out mediocrity was the two-team postseason of baseball, pre-1969, but I can’t imagine there’s a large cry to go back to that.
And scheduling, I think the competitive incentive to schedule weakly might exist without the financial incentive. Schools with their eyes on the prize just don’t want to risk losing to Podunk U in September, and they all know that the real tests come in conference play, especially SEC and Big 12 and the like, and don’t want to be at a disadvantage by that point in the season from losing to bad teams or playing tough competition.
MattR
@Bill Murray:
Then how do you suggest determining the true champion? And why is the FBS the only NCAA sport not decided by a tournament of some sort?
@Spaghetti Lee:
Right. Because narrowing 120 FBS teams down to 16 for a single elimination tournament is very similar to a league where 16 of 30 teams make the playoffs which are a series of best of 7 contests.
Spaghetti Lee
@MattR:
The regular season games everyone wants to see are the ones that involve teams that would make a hypothetical playoff anyway. Think about any top-10, division-deciding regular season matchup you’ve seen, then think about how different it would be if both teams were pretty sure to make the playoffs.
fucen tarmal
i’ve read enough of wetzel’s writting on the subject to know, he doesn’t have a clue as to why it might be a bad idea. like a lot of lazy writers, he comes to the subject without considering the opposite argument. there are tons of damned good reasons to not have a playoff, and only cynical responses by the proponents.
anytime your best argument is “everyone else is doing it” you deserve to be treated like a tween who uses the same argument.
Cheryl from Maryland
William and Mary lost to a BCS team, North Carolina, but only by 4 points. Forget the BCS, just watch 1-AA football and their actual playoff system.
MattR
@fucen tarmal:
I’d love to hear these. Lemme guess. Players would play too many games and there would be too many injuries and it would disrupt studies but we can’t shorten the regular season because we will lose tons of money.
The argument is that everyone else is doing it because that is the way it is done. You are trying to convince us that it is okay to spell cat K-A-T because that is how you have always done it.
@Spaghetti Lee: I can just as easily argue that there will be other games that are currently meaningless that will take on significance if the winner has the chance to advance to the playoffs. Since they had no chance to be the national champion regardless of what they did, did Boise State actually play any meaningful games in 2008 and 2009?
edmund dantes
Brian Kelly is an epic idiot. One of the biggest clusterfucks of decision making at the end of the game. I would love to know what he was thinking during the last minute of that game.
electricgrendel
Football is not basketball. It’s a much more dangerous sport. Putting college athletes through an entire post season just to soothe the fee-fees of fans of teams who go undefeated in trash conferences is ridiculous. I don’t agree with the current situation, and hate to sound simply contrarian, but I don’t think a play off is wise.
Then again, I think colleges should just sell their NFL junior leagues to enterprising sorts and be done with the business of football. The same for basketball and baseball and all the rest, too. Let universities be in the business of education, and not in the business of professional sports training grounds.
Thlayli
The college basketball season starts next week! Are we excited…?
Anyone…?
Bueller…?
…
For the average American sports fan, college basketball starts the morning the bracket sheet appears in their inbox.
Is that what you want for football? Four months of jockeying for position before the real games start?