Death to a Playoff

I have recently finished reading the famed Death to the BCS and I am very impressed. The authors put together some good arguments, did a tremendous amount of research, and all readers will come away better informed and more knowledgeable about the sport of college football. However, when you look past the exaggerations and distortions, the case for a playoff is still unsuccessful. By cutting through the fluff and hyperbole and looking at the facts and history, it is evident that the current college football postseason model of a 2 team playoff is clearly a superior method in determining the champion of any season. While there may be room for improvements in the way the current BCS system selects its teams, the championship game that the BCS system produces is consistently a more accurate reflection of the season's 2 best teams than any other playoff system currently applied to other major sports in the US.

My goal in the coming weeks is to dissect each chapter in Death to the BCS, point out what is right, what is flawed, and provide evidence of why a playoff is not right for college football. Every off-season, and anytime during the season when there is a slow week, the BCS gets hammered by pro-playoff types who are just looking to fill pages during a time with little to no real action on the college football landscape. People want to talk about something college football, so why not pick on the easy target of the BCS because it is different than the other postseasons. No one cares to argue that the BCS is an advancement in the postseasons, a postseason that emphasizes consistent and continual excellence. Few columnists risk the criticism that is sure to come by defending the unpopular system, and ridiculing the current playoff systems found in most sports. Other postseasons are filled with mediocre teams, some even without winning records, and somehow these systems are, without question, deemed more worthy than college football's model. My goal is to defend the “unworthy” model.

I will go through each point in the book, in a chapter by chapter analysis, to prove the inefficiencies of the playoff plan the authors propose. They claim it is an advancement, but it is nothing but a way to make college football just like every other sport, instead of maintaining the allure and uniqueness of the game. No college football fan wants that. Not only would it irreversibly change the game for the worse, their playoff plan would render over 100 years of history irrelevant, and that is a history we would sorely miss.