The Title Is: "This Post Has No Title"

Saturday, February 14, 2009 was a beautiful day for baseball here in Natchitoches.

Oh, so you went to a baseball game? Who won?

Um, no...

What did you do?

Actually, I went to the library to study, and took an hour off to go watch NSU women's tennis. It was a little strange, since they play all the matches at once. It's tough to keep track of six or seven matches at the same time. I had no idea who was winning or what the status of each match was. I later learned we lost 6-1, but I have to say that I still enjoyed the whole thing a lot. It's not Wimbledon or anything like that, where each court has its own set of stand watching. There's four courts on one side, and four more on the other side. You can sit on bleachers and watch either side. Or you can walk back and forth in the aisle between the two sides and watch a point here and a point there. It was very strange.

Then why did you open with the line about baseball?

Because that's what Harry Caray used to say when it was nice day out, jerkface, so leave me alone while I talk about football.

The Pittsburgh Steelers recently won their sixth Super Bowl when they put together a late drive and defeated the Arizona Cardinals. A few weeks earlier, the Florida Gators won their third national championship when they beat Oklahoma in the BCS title game. Arizona was a Cinderella story, as they had won a weak NFC division with a 9-7 record. They hosted an 11-5 Atlanta team in the first round, beat Carolina thanks to a complete implosion by Jake Delhomme in the second round, and hosted 9-6-1 Philadelphia in the NFC title game. Their appearance in the Super Bowl led some to say that a great story like that could never happen in college football, where the lack of a playoff wouldn't allow for such a thing. I think they're partially correct, but only because college football and the NFL are after two different things.

The thing that bothers me most about BCS bashing is that people aren't willing to admit that their goal is not to determine who the best team is, but to crown a champion. If you're looking for a champion, then a tournament (or playoff, whichever term you prefer to use) is absolutely the way to go. But if your goal is to find out who the best team is, then there are definite risks to holding a playoff. The most obvious is that the best team could lose.

NOTE: The dirty little secret of the NCAA tournament is that the NCAA hopes for upset the first weekend in order to build the drama and the Cinderella stories, but wants the traditional powerhouses to make it to the Elite 8 and the Final Four. As big a story as it was for George Mason to make it to the Final Four a few years ago, nobody is going to watch them play Butler in the title game.

Arizona finished first in a lousy division (NFC West), but still got to host a playoff game against a team that was two games better than they were in the regular season, along with playing in a tougher division (11-5 Atlanta from the NFC South). The last six weeks of the season Arizona was 2-4, with the four losses coming by margins of 12, 28, 21, and 40 points. Am I expected to believe that a system that allows a team like this to play for the championship is really interested in finding out who the best team is?

I don't mean to pile on the Arizona (formerly Phoenix, formerly St. Louis, formerly Chicago) Cardinals. They have nothing to apologize for and deserved to win all the playoff games they did. But they got as far as they did because of a system that also allowed an 8-8 San Diego Chargers team to host a playoff game against a team that finished four games better than they did in the regular season (and who beat them head-to-head), the 12-4 Indianapolis Colts. The Chargers made the playoffs over another team who finished three games ahead of them in the regular season, 11-5 New England.

So if you want to criticize the BCS for being a strange way to determine a champion, that's fine. But if you want to criticize the BCS for being a lousy way to determine who the best team is, then you should probably take a look at the flaws in the NFL playoff format first. The purpose of the BCS is to pick two teams at the end of the regular season to play for the championship. One of the writers over at CFN argues that this actually comes closer to determining the "best" team than a playoff does.

I'm not against a college football playoff. What I'm against is people being stupid and hypocritical about what they're after (which is entertainment and a champion, not finding the best team), especially stupid hypocrites who don't watch college football.

Of course, the fact that LSU has won two championships in the BCS era might be coloring my perception. Maybe.