College Football Is A Joke

There was some exciting college football played this weekend. We're well into the November rivalry games from coast-to-coast, where storied border battles are settled on the gridiron with a winner-take-the-weird-trophy competitive spirit.

In Madison, Wisconsin, the Badgers rallied from a two touchdown deficit to beat Minnesota for bragging rights of Paul Bunyan's axe.

It sure would be nice if the NCAA would let their championship be decided by implementing a playoff structure where teams would actually play each other to determine the best team in the country at seasons end.

Half of every Saturday we witness high-def rhetorical speculation over the national rankings of college football, where teams are - via sports writers opinions, coaches feelings and a stats geeks computer program - ranked from one to twenty-five in a fight to be one of the top two ranked teams at seasons and win the lottery of subjective opinion to play in the national championship game.

What a joke.

It's time to implement a college football playoff system so we can finally determine a champion on the field.

Detractors of a playoff format continue to drone about preserving the integrity of the bowl system. Talk about irony. Where's the integrity in not letting the players decide which two teams can play for the title?

We can still maintain our tradition of nursing a new year hangover while watching bowl games with holiday dietary regret. It's simple, actually.

Let's take the top eight teams from the existing rankings system and match them in a seeding format in the current Bowl Championship Series (BCS, or BS in its current form). These teams will play in four bowl games on January 1st; The Rose Bowl, The Sugar Bowl, The Orange Bowl and The Fiesta Bowl. The results of those games will determine the final four teams that will play for college footballs championship.

The following weekend (with a minimum seven days to rest and prepare for the next game) the semi-finals will be played, amounting to a football fans crack binge by having the games coincide with the NFL conference championship games.

The ensuing weekend (after the semi-final games) will be college footballs championship game. The game would be played during the weekend before the Super Bowl.

All of this adds two weeks to the existing college football season and doesn't detract from the student athletes (huh, what's that?) class schedule, as the majority of BCS schools are adjourned for winter break until spring semester begins.

What I describe will never happen though, as logic and common sense are nearly always lost on the NCAA.

Until things do change though, both players and fans of college football will continue to be screwed.