What do you do when you have seven undefeated teams all still believing that they indeed have a shot at a national championship and college football immortality? Well, if you’re a member of the BS, er, BCS committee, you hope that all but two of them (any two you like except for Utah or Boise State) find a way to lose before the BCS bowl schedule is announced after the end of the regular season.
With its new “power to the people and a few assorted computer nerds” formula, the BCS promises to be just as futile at picking a national championship game as it has been in almost any year since its inception.
No matter how you retool it, revamp it or completely rework it, the BCS formula never works. In fact, root canals are less painful than watching the BCS committee try to figure out which football teams are the best in the country.
The thing is, we all cried out last season that if only the human voters would have had more say, we could have seen LSU face off with USC in the first-annual All-Initial Bowl. Instead, computer rankings, electoral votes and a fourth-grader with an abacus determined that it would make the most sense if Oklahoma, fresh off getting obliterated by Kansas State in the Big 12 championship game, would take on LSU, leaving the top-ranked team in the country, USC, to settle for a Rose Bowl berth and a split national title after they convincingly beat Michigan.
So this year, the BCS told that fourth grader to take a hike, ditched the electoral votes thing (so as to confuse the nation only during the presidential election) and decided sports writers and football coaches should decide who the best college football team in the land is. If that would have been where the BCS stopped, the system might have been a step closer to getting it right, but the BCS committee wanted to empower their brethren in the pocket-protector community and retained the services of six computer rankings to make up one-third of the poll.
What a mistake that was. Leaving all of those darn machines involved leaves us one Trojan horse virus away from seeing a 1-6 Kent State squad take on a 1-7 Ball State team for the national title. What a tragedy that would be, as anyone not on athletic scholarship (and most who are) knows that neither Kent nor Ball are actually states.
To top it all off, the BCS concluded that just taking the average rankings would be far to simple and easy to interpret, and thus created a mathematical system to ensure that their place in the hierarchy of football would remain secure.
What does all of this mean? Basically that you should invest in Texas Instruments, because they will be doing some great business selling high-powered calculators to anyone who wishes to figure out the formula.
With the first two polls out, the new system seems to be working just fine, or at least that was the last word out of the office of the Minister of Information in Iraq.
USC is predictably, and deservedly, well out in first place. Oklahoma or Miami, depending on the week, follow in second and third places. Auburn, who many of the experts think is the second-best team in the country behind USC, sits in fourth. All four teams are undefeated, and all four, if the season were to end today, would have a reasonable claim to a spot in the Orange Bowl, this year’s host of the national championship game.
Now it gets really goofy. Florida State, a team with one loss, is ahead of Utah and Wisconsin, both of whom are undefeated. Not only that, but the seventh undefeated team, Boise State, isn’t even on the map, it’s so far behind the pack at No. 13.
Quite frankly, I don’t care who your opponents are. If you haven’t lost a game by the end of October, you deserve more respect than that.
Granted, these things usually work themselves out — namely, the list of seven undefeated teams will likely be trimmed down to one or two by the time the season is over, making the BCS decision-making that much easier (or harder, I suppose, if you figure they will have to pick just one of the 10 or so teams that will be left with just one loss). Still, there has got to be a better way.
So I present to you a better way … the Knickmeyer Index.
First, so as not to alienate all of those folks down at the BCS headquarters, allow them to choose the 16 most eligible teams to compete for a shot at the national championship. I realize that the BCS committee likely would not be able to handle this task either, but a football season without the BCS blowing … it just seems incomplete.
After the top 16 teams have been decided, it’s time to winnow the candidates down to the best two by using a three-part system to determine the national title game participants.
The Corso Number: The first part of the equation allows college football guru Lee Corso the chance to rank the 16 teams based on his favorite mascot heads. After choosing which mascots he likes best, his rankings will be awarded random numbers to be divided by pi, thereby yielding the Corso Number.
Cheerleader mud-wrestling: Each of the final 16’s cheerleaders will get a chance to battle one another in a mud-wrestling fest that will determine the way in which the schools should be ranked. While some questions may be raised about the political correctness of this, the dollars brought through pay-per-view will easily sway the college presidents’ opinions.
GPA: Pretty simple: take the cumulative GPA of each team. This should be a pretty fair category, as they are all student athletes.
To determine who should play for the national championship, simply take the Corso Number and the final standings of the cheerleader mud-wrestling and add them together. Divide that by the cumulative GPA, and whoever has the highest two total scores will be playing for the national championship.
Of course if the NCAA ever found a way to see past the money of the BCS and institute a play-off system, I could get behind that too.
