Oklahoma wins, Ohio State is in. West Virgina loses, LSU is in. If you’re a Buckeye fan, I’m happy for you. If you’re a college football fan, someone who loves the sport, not the individual team, I feel for you.
This whole thing is a joke.
There is no way on God’s green earth that a team should go from fifth, to third to championship game without playing a game. But that’s exactly what Ohio State has done, since beating Michigan. LSU & Kansas lost last week, Ohio State moved up to third. Oklahoma beat Missouri Saturday night, Pitt beat West Virginia, and OSU moves up to the top spot and a berth in the national championship game. Excuse Jim Tressel if he’s saying today…this’d be a helluva job, if we didn’t have to play those damn games.
I’ve got nothing against Ohio State and if I did, I’d have the sense to keep my mouth shut about it. It’s not about Ohio State, it’s about the ‘state’ of division one college football. The whole thing is a joke, and you’re the butt end of it.
One-A football has a playoff, two-a, three-a, every level of NCAA basketball has a playoff except, of course, the one NCAA sport that the entire world follows, Division One football. Everybody follows it. People who don’t know if a football is blown up or stuffed follow NCAA Division One college football. On the grand scale of sports, it plays number two to the NFL’s number one.
People get geeked about the NCAA division one basketball tournament, but only because of the brackets. They want to win their office pool, be the only ones at work to correctly predict Princeton will knock off Washington State and have Villanova going all the way. That’s the allure of the NCAA tournament.
But college football? College football is a social event as much as a sport. It’s parking on the edge of campus and walking through the reds and yellows of autumn leaves on the way to the stadium. It’s your college band playing your college fight song. It’s taking your wife back to your school to watch
your team and running into your college sweetheart. Don’t think that hasn’t happened once or twice.
It’s stopping by the drive through on Friday night so you’ve got the brewskis in the fridge for at least 12 hours before kickoff. It’s inviting your friends over to watch your team play on your brand new 42-inch flat panel.
College football is high fives, groans, cheers and wondering exactly what drug the offensive coordinator is on when he calls an off tackle run on third and 14.
So why is Division One college football ‘not’ good enough for a playoff?
When the argument for one came up many years ago we first heard ‘well, we wouldn’t want to disrupt the sanctity of the bowl system. The bowls game operators would be compromised by a playoff system. (emphasis on the word operators). How could you have a national championship game in the Rose Bowl without offending the Orange Bowl and making the Cotton Bowl feel less important. Guess what? That’s exactly what we’ve got now, with no playoff. The Orange Bowl and the Rose Bowl and every other bowl game doesn’t get to host the national title game. And the Cotton Bowl hasn’t been a major New Year’s Day destination for years.
Lately we’ve heard, ‘well, we couldn’t extend the season, the student-athletes would miss too much time in the class room. The can’t be playing football three weeks into January. Of course, these same academians, so far removed from the real world that they suffer panic attacks when leaving campus, have no trouble letting student-athletes play three weeks of basketball in March. Or look the other way when a senior football player stops going to class and starts going to draft camps after Christmas.
The whole thing is a joke.
But you know what? I’ve got a solution. It’s always better to be part of the solution, than part of the problem. So while I was watching Oklahoma beat Missouri Saturday night, I came up with a plan. Call it the Broo plan.
My wife, the first Mrs. Ken likes to tell me I’m long on plans and short on delivery. So let me deliver my plan for a Division One college football playoff.
First, no team plays more than eleven regular season games. Eliminate the conference championship games. You won’t need them. They simply exist as money makers for conferences. You’ll make so much money with this plan, believe me, everybody will be happy. Everybody.
My plan would call for the the top 12 teams, plus one, to play off for the national title. The 13 would be decided by the same folks who decided on the rankings up until this BCS nonsense began: the football writers, broadcasters and the coaches. One poll, 13 teams.
Each team would be seeded. The number one team would draw a bye until the semi-finals.
13 teams, 12 games in the first round of games. 12 teams, six games in the second. In round three, reseed the teams, the number ranked team would play the fourth seeded team. Two would play three.
On championship weekend, you would decide the national champion.
Now think about this. Most, if not all of college football’s regular season is done, as of last night. Most, if not all of colleges on the quarter system are finished for the holiday break by the end of this week. Most schools on semesters….most….are finished by December 20. When do the bowl games begin? Right….just about every year on December 20.
If the team ranked number one entering the playoffs wins the championship, it will play 13 games. The team it faces, if number one gets that far, would play a maximum of 15. Bowl eligible teams play 12 regular season games as it is now. And a lot of them have a lot of time off in between their regular season finale and their bowl game. Look at Ohio State.
What about the teams below the top 13? Well, remember, there are 32 bowl games. My system would need 12 bowls or sites to whittle down to one
champion. That leaves 20 other current bowl games that need teams. That’s 40 more team. That would mean the top 53-teams in the country would play in a post game season game. Do we really need more than that?
Think of the excitement, the hype. Number 11 Cincinnati gets to play number two Kansas in week one at the Holiday Bowl…or the Music City Bowl….winner moves onto the Capital One Bowl in Orlando.
UC fan tell me you wouldn’t want that, instead of what you got for your troubles this season.
Number one LSU, let’s say, lying in wait in Baton Rouge, watching all of this play out, the chatter on radio stations like this one all about whether or not the teams playing will be tired by the time LSU joins the party….or will LSU be rusty and primed for an upset when Ohio State gets ahold of them.
It’s be crazy. It’s be good. It makes too much sense not to do it. Bu that’s probably why the NCAA would never go for it. Probably why this time next year, somebody else who’s had a little too much to drink on a Saturday night will come up with another plan and talk about it on this radio station the next morning.
All I know is this: the NCAA’s BCS deal? The whole thing is a joke.
THE BROO VIEW: Cincinnati's Legendary Sportscaster Offer His Thoughts On The Ever Changing World Of Sports
