The BCS “system” is patently absurd. It has prevented college football from producing true national champions.
Every other college sport — and college football at every other level — decides its champion in an orderly and sensible fashion.
The BCS “system” protected revenue-generating bowl games and favored the big-dollar conferences, so it prevailed despite the protests of fans, sportswriters, coaches and athletic directors from outside the BCS loop.
Alas, the college sports power brokers are finally realizing that the current BCS “structure” is bad for business. The Alabama-LSU "title game" did not capture America's imagination.
Change is afoot, with the Big Ten instigating it.
Yahoo! Sports columnist Dan Wetzel explains:
Of all the criticism lobbed at Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany through the years – and it’s been considerable – no one ever has said he wasn’t intelligent, pragmatic and, most important, politically savvy.
Delany was going to defend the controversial BCS until the moment he wasn’t. And at that point, he was going to run from it like the tire fire it is.
Delany understands the winds of change blowing through college football and that the likelihood he could hold off a playoff was remote, at best.
So now the death of the BCS is upon us. That much is certain.
Right now, there isn’t a single conference publicly supporting the current system. All that’s left are a few rogue holdouts among presidents, coaches and athletic directors, and not even Delany is among them.
We appear headed for a four-team playoff. If that goes well (and it will), then the concept could be expanded at a later date. Maybe, just maybe, we’ll see a real playoff format in our lifetime.
“Everyone who looks at the plus-one model realizes that if you have four teams in play, you're still going to have the fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth teams saying we got a bad deal, we should be one of those four teams,” Nebraska athletic director Tom Osborne told The Associated Press. “So there'll be continual unrest until you have some kind of a much larger playoff.”
MYSTERIES OF THE UNIVERSE
Questions to ponder while the Rams finally settle on their next general manager:
If Rob Gronkowski's ankle was so bad, why was he dancing like a mad man a few short hours after the Super Bowl?
Will weeping Patriots fans ever recover from this loss?
Is it wrong to pile on Wes Welker with a Butterfingers prank?
Did the Giants pick up some too-casual fans with their Super Bowl victory?
Why sort of lunatic would unplug the TV during the Super Bowl?
QUIPS ‘R US
Here is what some of America’s leading sports pundits have been writing:
Bill Simmons, ESPN.com: “Here's the dirty secret about sports in 2012: None of these NFL playoff teams were that good. I don't think there was any real difference between the Ravens, Giants, Packers, Niners and Patriots. If you played a round-robin tournament with those five teams 100 times, part of me wonders if each team would win 10 times, then the other 50 times would come down to these pivotal moments that we kept seeing these past three games: a stripped pass in the end zone, a kick returner fumbling twice, a shanked 32-yard field goal, a potential stake-in-the-heart catch not getting caught, the same team recovering three fumbles, a sprained ankle swinging a game, the perfect sack at the perfect time.”
Jason Whitlock, FoxSports.com: “Feb. 5, 2012 — the day Eli Manning surpassed his big brother, cemented Tom Coughlin’s legacy and damaged Tom Brady’s and Bill Belichick’s reputations with another scintillating, fourth-quarter touchdown drive — is still fresh in our minds. And it just might be another four decades before we see an NFL game as significant as the Giants’ 21-17 victory over the Patriots in Super Bowl XLVI. The victory Eli Manning engineered inside The House Peyton Built could dramatically change, for the worse, the narrative on three of the biggest names in all of sports (Peyton Manning, Tom Brady and Bill Belichick).”
Mike Freeman, CBSSports.com: “Brady has been compared to Joe Montana. Montana didn't lose in the Super Bowl. I've called Belichick the greatest coach of all time. The great ones -- the Bill Walshes, the Lombardis -- don't lose two straight Super Bowls to one guy. Just doesn't happen.”
Norman Chad, Washington Post: “Belichick wears a suit en route to the game, then switches to a hoodie for the game (in a dome). Now, that’s genius.”
Mike Bianchi, Orlando Sentinel: “I'm not saying Madonna is getting old, but she appears to have had so much work done on her face that she should open up the Super Bowl Halftime Show with ‘Like a Surgeon.’”
Greg Cote, Miami Herald: “An overwhelming 82.6 percent of all Super Bowls (38 of 46) have included at least one first-round starting quarterback. That includes the past nine in a row, indicative of the position only growing in importance and as a factor in reaching this game. In nearly one in four SBs (11 of 46, or 23.9 percent), both QBs were 1R-pedigreed. First-round draftees in fact account for more than half of all Super Bowl starting quarterbacks — 49 of 92, or 53.3 percent. So Dolfans who are hoping for Peyton Manning are not just pining nostalgically. Perhaps they are putting trust in the historical map that suggests a first-round quarterback is your path to a Super Bowl.”
MEGAPHONE
“If you want to have fun, like I did with Bill Walton, play with LeBron. It would have probably been more fun to play with LeBron, but if you want to win and win and win, it's Kobe. Not that LeBron's not a winner, just that [Kobe's] mindset is to go into every practice, every game, to get better.”
Larry Bird, to ESPN.com, comparing Kobe Bryant to LeBron James.
