Git up, a-git git down, the Bowl Championship Series is a joke in your town

After a topsy-turvy season, with many crazy upsets, and many surprise contenders, this year’s college football bowl games have been announced. And I couldn’t be more disappointed. Ohio State versus LSU? For real? Was the cabal that decides who gets to play intentionally trying to go for the least original, least interesting match-up possible? In the past five years, each of those teams has won a national championship, and Ohio State was the runner-up once as well. I don’t wish to rain on the parade of those of my friends who support these universities’ football teams, but this is so anticlimactic.

The star chamber that runs the Bowl Championship Series is inscrutable and opaque in their deliberations. Ohio State gets to play for a national championship despite the fact that they lost to the unranked Fighting Illini. This could have been so much more interesting. There were so many teams that made surprise appearances in the top 25 (like U-Conn, Cincinnati, South Florida, Rutgers), to say nothing of all the surprise teams that were in the top 5. If you had told me in August that the universities of Kansas, Missouri, Oregon would make appearances in the top two spots, I would have called you a lying scumbag.

Granted, LSU and Ohio State did stay atop the various polls for large portions of the season. But that doesn’t really mean anything to me since I place so little faith in the legitimacy of all those polls. This whole system merely makes it all the more clear what a hypocritical farce college football has become. Who gets to play in the national championship should be determined by young men on the field. Instead, those same young men have to sit around a room watching a large television screen waiting to see which teams a group of mostly middle-aged, mostly male sportswriters and whatnot have decided they think are the best. It is a slap in the face to the notions of competition and sport.

There has to be a playoff. It is the only fair, reasonable way to pick a champion. Every argument that has been put forward explaining why that’s not possible is unconvincing. The NCAA does it for Division III and the erstwhile Division I-AA. What’s so different about D-I football that they can’t do it with those teams? I can answer that question: it’s all about the benjamins. The Bowl Championship Series is nothing more than a scam to ensure that the schools that are already on top stay on top. A few conferences shut out everyone else, so they can get the bowl money and continue to sink it into their football programs, thus ensuring their continued dominance. The University of Hawai’i is the only undefeated team in Division I, but they don’t get to contend because they happen to play in a "secondary" conference. Without playoffs, you can expect to see the same five or six teams in the championship game every year. I don’t have any attachment to any of the big D-I teams, and thus I’ve never been that into college football. But with the attachment of corporate sponsors to bowl games, the absurd methods of selecting a champion, and the overall divorce of college football from actual colleges, I find myself increasingly disgusted by the whole spectacle. What a joke.