My Beef with College Football

Let me start with this caveat-I have never been a rabid college football fan. I do not know if it is because I grew up in the Northeast, I went to a college that was a Division III school, or my dad never had any games on unless it was Bowl Season. I am not one of those people who wait with bated breath for college football to commence. I do watch some of the Bowl Games, and I will pick a team for whom to root. That's the extent of my involvement.

However, I do have a beef with college football. It's called how the heck do you determine a National Champion? Until the BCS was instituted a few years ago, there were two polls that ranked the teams. At the end of the season, if you were on top, you were the champion. Yet there were those years that the polls did not "choose" the same top team; therefore, two universities would spend an entire year arguing as to why their football team was the "true" National Champion.

Finally those higher ups in the college football world realized that something needed to be done to eradicate the "two champion" team conundrum. Enter the BCS. A specific formula was created, which includes the strength of each college football team's schedule and their record, and each week a list is spit out by a computer ranking all of the football teams. The intention of the BCS is to ensure that the top two teams play each other at the end of the season for the National Championship. I have listened to many college football fans discuss the BCS. Some believe that it does provide for the cream of the crop to duke it out on the big stage. Others strongly advocate that amazing teams do not get the respect they deserve due to the BCS. Some fans go as far as to say that the BCS is just a bunch of crap. Let's not forget that the winners of specific conferences are guaranteed to get a spot in one of the premiere Bowl games. Honestly, this is all too confusing for me.

Ideally, college football should have a playoff system. Every other major sport does this. Playoffs ensure that one team wins the National title. However, I am a realist and I know that Bowl games bring in the big bucks for the universities that play in them. Why would you advocate for a playoff system when your school receives tons of money? I wouldn't want to do it if I was president of the University of Alabama, University of Florida, or University of Southern California (these are just examples so no tomato throwing-remember, I have no favorite team).

Therefore, this brings me back to my original complaint about college football. How do you determine who is the big kahuna? As the Owl in the Tootsie Roll commercial so eloquently stated, "the world may never know."