Bowling The Perfect Game

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Bowling the Perfect Game

Audience: college football fans

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Every March, the NCAA holds its March Madness Basketball Tournament. Sixty-four teams square off against one another in a 3 week battle to be the best. It is one of the most popular athletic events in the United States, second only to the Super Bowl (Villano, 2007). People stream into Las Vegas casinos, local sports bars, and friends’ homes to watch their teams battle it out on the court. In the end, there is a clear champion crowned. A team which has battled through six games to come out on top of all the rest. There is no debate about who the true champion is. It is clear because it was proven on the court. The same can not be said for every other major college sport. All of them have some sort of a playoff system at the end of the season, except for one. And it happens to be the most popular of all college sports, football (Harris Interactive, 2005). My goal is to explain why this needs to change and how it should be done.

In 1936, the Associated Press began asking a number of sports writers who they thought the best college football teams were. These votes were counted on a weekly basis and at the end of the season an unofficial champion was crowned (Bara, 2003). It did not matter what the team’s win-loss record was or who they played. All that mattered was that the writers for the Associated Press thought you were good. In 1950, United Press International began asking the coaches of college football teams who the best football team was (Bara, 2003). This was done in much the same way as the Associated Press poll and it had the same drawbacks. These polls were initially taken before the bowl games. The bowl games are a series of games that are held after the regular season. They never mattered much in the beginning. They were not meant to crown a champion, they were simply games awarded to some of the better teams at the end of the season as a reward. It

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was a chance to take a trip to a warm-weather locale in the dead of winter. It was not until sometime in the 1970’s that the two polls decided to wait until after the bowl games to submit their final results.

The polls were obviously not a good way to crown a champion. They were rife with inconsistency from season to season. It was all too easy for bias to bleed into the system. There were many instances where one team seemed more deserving to be champion than another, but were overlooked by the pollsters. In 1993, The University of Notre Dame’s football team beat the Florida State Seminoles. The Seminoles were ranked number one in the nation at the time and Notre Dame was ranked number two. After the game they flipped positions in the polls with Notre Dame in the first spot and Florida State in the second. Notre Dame went on to lose the last game of the season giving both teams an identical record. They both won their bowl games. With both teams having identical records and Notre Dame beating Florida State in the regular season, logic would say that Notre Dame was more deserving of being crowned national champion. Logic did not win out in this instance. Despite beating Florida State, Notre Dame was ranked behind them in the final poll. It did not matter what anyone thought, the sports writers had spoken. There are many more examples similar to this. It happened so much that the bowl coalition tried to fix the situation by introducing the Bowl Championship Series.

Beginning in 1997, the Bowl Championship Series was put into place in order to guarantee that the number one and number two teams in the nation met in the final bowl game of the year. It is not a playoff system, and it does not necessarily take the top two

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teams from the Associated Press poll or the coach’s poll (BCS Chronology, 2006). It created its own ratings system that incorporates a number of different statistics, including both of the previously mentioned polls. The system is so intricate that it requires computers to tally the points and rank the teams. This is supposed to eliminate any doubt as to whom the top two teams in the nation are. Despite their best efforts, the system still has its problems. For one the data is fed to the computers by bias human beings. This is the same drawback that failed the previous rankings system. Also, in 2004 there was another instance of a deserving team being locked out of the championship game. There were three undefeated teams at the end of the season that year, The University of Southern California, the University of Oklahoma, and Auburn University. With room for only two teams to play in the title game, one would be left in the cold. The decision was not made on the field as it should have been, it was made by the computers that tally the BCS ratings. Auburn’s coach Tommy Tubberville had to go tell his players that the hard work that they put in over the last three months was all for naught because the BCS computers thought that two other teams were more worthy of a chance to play for the national championship. This is unfair and unreasonable to expect the players, fans and coaches to accept this system. So why do they?

It is important to emphasize that the Bowl Championship Series incorporates the existing bowl system in its formula. Without this, the series probably would not have come to pass. The current bowl system has been around since 1902. Back then the Rose Bowl was the only postseason game. Through the years a lot of bowl games have been added but one thing remains the same. It is the only major college sports postseason that

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is not run by the NCAA. The bowl games are each run by the individual bowl commissioners. There are no committees and no governing bodies to watch over them. This allows them a lot of luxuries. The biggest being that all of the money made is theirs to do with whatever they wish. They do not have a relationship with the NCAA but they have had a long-standing, closely guarded relationship with the Universities and they spend millions every year to make sure that the no one interferes with it (Fish, 1999). As long as that relationship is kept safe and they have the ears of the University Presidents there is little chance that the system will change. It is the University Presidents that decide what happens when the season ends. It is they who sign the long-term contracts with the bowl commissioners.