To the ever-growing list of life’s certainties—death, taxes, fourth-quarter comebacks by Tim Tebow—we can now add annual complaints about college football’s Bowl Championship Series. Last night, a panel of human voters, prone, as a species, to mistakes, and computers, prone, as devices, to a lack of emotion, selected Louisiana State and Alabama as title-game opponents. This means we will get to watch the Game of the Century again, two months after the last one, even if the first one, in which no one scored a touchdown, barely registered as the Game of the Evening.
Elsewhere, it’s Michigan vs. Virginia Tech in the Sugar, West Virginia vs. Clemson in the Orange, and Wisconsin vs. Oregon in the Rose. The last B.C.S. bowl, the Fiesta, will feature Stanford, which has Andrew Luck, and the Oklahoma State Cowboys, who have sour grapes. Cries resounded yesterday in support of the Cowboys, third in the B.C.S. rankings, with an record identical to Alabama's and an equal-if-not-superior argument for the second spot. (L.S.U.’s position at the top, as the lone undefeated team, was unassailable.) Some felt that by virtue of being in the Southeastern Conference, college football’s perceived powerhouse, Alabama was favored over O.S.U., which toils in the Big 12—never mind the fact that, according to the computers, the Cowboys had actually played more difficult opponents. The college-football-loving heart of our football-mad country undoubtedly lies somewhere east of Dallas and south of Nashville, but the fact that a team from the S.E.C. will be college football’s champion for the sixth straight year suggests an improper balance of some kind. For comparison, there’s this: the last five college basketball champions have come from four different conferences.
In the parlance of our moment, that makes the S.E.C. college football’s one per cent, and an attendant “#occupybcs” movement rose up yesterday in certain Cowboys-affiliated corners of Twitter, if not quite trending worldwide. No one was calling for an encampment outside the Superdome, site of the national championship game—a protest at the Capital One Bowl would be more ideologically coherent—but there was a suggestion that all conscious Americans should “vote with their remotes.” This meant turning the game off, which, if everyone did, would just about sink the whole endeavor—the broadcast rights to each of the five B.C.S. games are valued at upwards of $20 million—and get the ninety-nine per cent what it wants: a playoff.
But would that solve the problem? Only if we believe that a playoff system produces a truer champion. But all of our systems are arbitrary—how, for instance, did baseball, basketball, and hockey settle on seven game series?—and each has its flaws. The system we prefer depends on what we believe makes one team better than all the others: is it the team that has the best regular season (college football), the team that finds a spark at the right moment (college basketball, professional football), or the team best suited to win four out of seven games. The B.C.S. is, in at least one sense—its reliance on computers—a very modern attempt at producing an athletic champion, centered on a belief that through careful calculation we can efficiently produce the most qualified team. There’s something to that, but as members of the ninety-nine per cent know, efficiency has its downsides.
