In 1985, the Georgetown University men’s basketball team won 35 games and lost only three. The third loss was in the NCAA championship game to Villanova, a team that Georgetown had already defeated twice during the Big East Conference’s regular season. Georgetown also won the Big East Conference tournament that year, while Villanova failed to reach the final. Georgetown entered the NCAA tournament as a first seed and the number-one ranked team in the Associated Press poll. Villanova was 19-10, an eighth seed and unranked by the AP. Nobody disputes the legitimacy of Villanova’s championship, however, even though Georgetown finished with a superior record and was still 2-1 head-to-head against Villanova. History only counts that final game.
The ’85 Hoyas are a cautionary tale for those who consistently – and angrily – complain about the “lack of a college football playoff” in the NCAA’s top football subdivision. Major college football, which dates back to the 19th century, has never held a postseason playoff tournament. The fact that the sport has thrived despite failing to mimic every other sports organization should be a testament to college football’s emphasis on regional appeal and traditional rivalries. Alas, those who don’t embrace central authority and nationalization are objects of scorn in modern America.
Nothing, aside from maybe Sarah Palin, arouses irrational anger faster then the Bowl Championship Series, the alliance of traditional (and many not-so-traditional) bowl games that serve as a postscript to college football’s regular season. Since 1998, the BCS has operated its own ranking system for college football and arranges a bowl matchup between the first- and second-ranked teams. This year’s championship will feature the universities of Florida and Oklahoma. Much has been said about the BCS ranking methodology, and it won’t be repeated here. Whether Florida or Oklahoma “deserve” to be in the title game is a moot point. BCS critics are opposed to the system itself. Normally rational people decry the BCS as “evil.” Some argue the BCS violates consumer rights. As my friend Steve Czaban, a host for Fox Sports Radio, has said, “In America we get what we want, when we want it and lots of it.” And we’re not getting enough postseason college football in his view. Texas Rep. Joe Barton – perturbed that Oklahoma made the championship game instead of Texas – has gone so far as to introduce a bill transferring control of postseason football from the NCAA and its member conferences to the Federal Trade Commission. Under his proposal, the FTC could ban the marketing of the BCS or any postseason football game as a “national championship” without the agency’s consent.
Even self-described libertarians can’t help themselves. Reason’s Radley Balko complained this morning that the University of Utah – which finished its season 13-0 after defeating Alabama in last night’s Sugar Bowl – is kept out of the national championship picture by the loathsome BCS:
So if you’re running a sports league, and if one of the teams in your league finishes the season undefeated, and if that team still has no chance of being your league’s champion, your system pretty much stinks. College football isn’t my favorite spectator sport. But I do watch the major bowls every year, mostly just to root for a BCS train wreck.
There are several problems with this argument. First, the NCAA is not a “sports league”; it’s an association of independent universities and affiliated athletic conferences. There are actually 11 “leagues” within the top football subdivision. Each crowns its own champion, just as Utah was the Mountain West Conference champion.
Second, even if the NCAA implemented the commonly suggested eight-team playoff, “undefeated” schools like Utah would still probably get left out. Assuming the NCAA awarded automatic bids to the six BCS conferences – the Mountain West is not one of those – that leaves just two at-large bids, which would almost certainly go to BCS conference schools that played tougher schedules. When you have over 100 schools playing just 12 games annually, there’s a substantial imbalance in schedule strength.
Third, there is no “BCS train wreck.” The system didn’t fail. It’s done exactly what it’s designed to do – select two teams to play in a BCS championship game. It’s not train wreck to merely because Balko dislikes the system.
The BCS is neither good nor evil. The system simply reflects the preferences of the parties involved. The bowl system tends to benefit the players, universities, conferences, and local non-profit organizations that administer the bowls. The potential beneficiaries of a playoff include the media, “casual” fans like Balko and people who like to gamble on sporting events. (Remember, the popularity of the NCAA basketball tournament is driven more by office pools then love of amateur basketball.) It’s dangerous to restate subjective preferences of different groups in absolute terms of right and wrong. College football already relies heavily on state intervention – both through special legal protections and the state-supported universities that dominate football – and the moral cries of BCS opponents could prompt a full-scale nationalization.
And a federally-mandated playoff won’t make the “national champion” any more or less legitimate. Just look at the National Football League, which has held a playoff tournament for years. Some people – including, once again, Radley Balko – have complained that the New England Patriots were kept out of this year’s playoffs despite an 11-5 record, while the Arizona Cardinals qualified at 8-8. There’s no mystery here. Arizona won its four-team division. New England lost its division on a tiebreaker to Miami, and it finished third in the standings for its conference’s two wild card spots, losing another tiebreaker to Baltimore. Balko said the NFL needs to “fix” its system to prevent this from happening in the future, but it’s not clear what’s broken. Everyone knew the schedule and tiebreakers going into the season. New England was not treated unfairly. But once again, if Balko doesn’t like the outcome, it’s an objectively bad system. Some people are never satisfied.
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with a group of people getting together, thwarting the BCS methodology and declaring their own “national champion,” such as the undefeated Utah team. The market might support an alternative college football championship sanctioning body. Heck, it does, then I’m starting a campaign to retroactively declare Georgetown the 1985 NCAA men’s basketball champion. Because any system that forces the best team in the country to play a third game against a twice-defeated foe is clearly immoral and antithetical to American values.
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You can find blogs on various sports sites with hundreds of entries on a given topic. Is the SEC the best conference in college football? That question alone elicits emotional and heart-felt responses that go on endlessly.
Meanwhile, in other news, people are being slaughtered in Gaza, Afghanistan and Iraq….
It sure would be nice if the average American emerged from his cocoon long enough to educate himself on what his government is doing in his name. The world would be a far better place.
I agree that government mandated playoffs do not legitimize champions – but the market may be changing things before the government ever steps in anyway.
Advertisers are certainly sensitive to the will of the fans, and it is advertisers who are often the loudest when it comes to changes in such a system. It appears to me that if it is in the advertisers and colleges best interest to appease the fans, then the system will change.
My personal opinion is that a playoff system is less ambiguous and therefore arguably more efficient in determining a “legitimate” champion. Such a system should not come about by government decree.
As a side note, Utah is in the Mountain West conference. The Boise State Broncos (of which I am an alum) are the WAC champions this year.
The BCS system is a fraud perpetuated by a government protected “non-profit†cartel that squeezes every last dollar it can from an “amateur†sport while at the same time sanctimoniously reproaching other individuals who try to get a piece of the action. In my view it is unworthy of a defense by any individual who values liberty.
Nonetheless if you are going to crown a national, conference or even a division champion then you must decide how that champion will be determined. Do you trust polls, computer programs, college presidents, bureaucrats, bowl committees and other non-objective criteria or do you settle it on the field of play?
Politics or performance?
If you prefer politics would you then like to apply that same standard to any other area of your life?
As for myself I choose performance. If you don’t want to settle it on the field of play or in the free market then just end the charade and be done with it.
Steve,
The average American KNOWS what his government is doing in his/her name: spreading democracy. Didn’t you get the memo?
Or, more scary, it makes no difference what the populace knows or thinks. But folks seem to be waking up.
Don’t hate too much on Balko, he does good work.
Remember, it’s one thing to say the BCS is a bad system and another to say the Feds should control it. I would doubt Balko would say the latter.
1) Does it really matter?
2) Since the President-elect has declared that he wants to see a D1 playoff system to determine a champion, I’m encouraged he has seen the value in competition… excellence… achievement… but I’m not a betting man.
I don’t know how the Austrian School treats Kenneth Arrow’s impossibility theorem, but this seems to be one of its logical applications. One will simply never derive a socially optimal outcome from rank ordering individual preferences when there are three or more choices.
The playoff system runs into the obvious problem of improper seeding. In a 4 team playoff, if the 4th seed is signicantly better than the 3rd seed (1 vs 4, 2 vs 3), then the 1st seed — who is obviously better than both the 2nd and 3rd seeds — would have a disadvantage to the 2nd seed. What results could be a 2 vs. 4 game in the championship game, when a 1 vs 2 or 1 vs 3 were obviously superior matchups prior to the playoff.
The same can be said of electing the president. If you consider primaries to be “playoff” rounds and this silly two-party system for determining the office, then you could render an inferior 2 vs 4 when a 1 vs 2 would have been preferential.
The people who get lost in call for a playoff are those who support the football team, but don’t actually play or coach the team. This includes the band, cheerleaders, dance team, flag corps, and althetic assistants on the sidelines. Remember that “bowl season” occurs during Winter Break (or exam period if the playoff started in mid-December). So while you can question the players’ “amateur” status, one can certainly not question the band’s.
The debate over the BCS system reminds me of the book “Super Cruncher” by Ian Ayres. In his book Ayres demonstrates that simple statistical models outperform experts in any field almost every time. The BCS model is statistical model patterned after the one used to rank chess champions. Of course the “experts” hate it; it proves them wrong most of the time.
Ayers starts off the book with a story about a wine lover who came up with a simple regression model to predict the quality of wines. He used two predictor variables–sunshine and temperature. The experts hated him and did everything they could to ruin him, but eventually had to join him.
The BCS model is far more accurate at predicting the best teams than all of the experts put together. That doesn’t mean it can predict which team will win a particular game. Winning a game involves a great deal of chance. Referees make bad calls and miss violations they should have made. Ball take unusual bounces. The field trips runners. Many events in a game have little to do with talent and skill.
If I have any gripe with college football it’s with the pay of the athletes. They make about twice the minimum wage while the school, coaches and staff make millions. And the income from college football supports every other sport on campus except for basketball. Talk about exploitation of the most extreme kind! And very few college players will go on to play pro ball. We should abolish the NCAA and allow colleges to bid for players just like the NFL does.
PS, Continuing the thought that the best team does not always win a game, people should read the work of the great psychologist Victor Frankl who invented the concept of paradoxical intention. He applies it to sports in one of his books and writes that in order to play well, players must be relaxed, confident and focused on their assignments, not on winning. Coaches who focus on winning often lose because it makes their players tense and takes their focus off of their individual performance.
Has anyone ever seen a clearly inferior team beat an obviously superior one? How about Houston beating Tennessee last month in the NFL? That often happens because of paradoxical intention. The superior team has nothing to gain from beating an inferior team because they are expected to win. As a result, they concentrate on not losing and play below their normal ability. On the other hand, the inferior team has nothing to lose. As a result, they are relaxed and confident and play above their normal ability.
I wrote all of the above to demonstrate that a playoff system wouldn’t necessarily prove which is the better team. A statistical model, like the BCS, is much better at determining that.
I always thought the purpose of the BCS was to choose who the best team is, so everyone wouldn’t have to argue about it so much. Seems to me that having a playoff do that better 90% of the time.
I consider myself to be an anarcho-capitalist and I also think the Utes should be voted #1. Just because I am a libertarian doesn’t mean I have to like the system that was put in place. It may reflect the preferences of the parties involved, but definitely not the fans, most of whom want a playoff.
The sports craze is one of the signs of degeneracy of society into materialism. Yet, at least there is some relief from the constant propagandizing via ‘news’ by the unConstitutional coup!
Wait, it may be more subtle but it is there!
Forgive my stating the obvious, as I’m wont to do, but most troubling (yet not surprising) was simply that the President-elect was questioned, then weighed-in, on the “national championship” debate. Notwithstanding my own love of football, this occurance is enough, by itself, to illustrate the perversion of the Framers’ dream.
How distant we are to a limited government republic — the witless public longingly looks to some kingly figurehead whose enumerated powers have somehow evolved into promoting a specific framework for spectator entertainments. And, holy cripe, he enthusiastically welcomes the discussion! Again, why the hell should I be surprised?
Perhaps the inquisitive “journalists” and the President-elect need to worry more about the soldiers who die in the name of what is called the United States, and less about which drunken fan is rationally justified in waving his styrofoam “We’re Number 1″ finger.
When this was being discussed with Obama, I just shook my head, further dismayed that most in this country wouldn’t have a clue as to why this is so absurd and revolting to me. It never ends: What did Obama wear on the beach? Does Santa still come for his kids? What is Michelle’s opinion on this?
With each passing day, the dream of that promised land of liberty seems to wane and fade like the crystal images of stars that become overwhelmed by the morning light. But there is still hope, nevertheless. Although the daylight hides them from our eyes, those stars are still up there, waiting to be reached.
Happy new year, everyone.
F.
fundamentalist: “We should abolish the NCAA and allow colleges to bid for players just like the NFL does.”
Better yet, let’s spin sports programs off from universities altogether instead and create regional minor leagues for each sport at the local level. Then, if someone wishes to pursue becoming a paid, professional athlete full time or to play sports on the side for leisure past high school, they can do so without the frequent pretense of going to college to actually pursue academic programs (with full paid scholarships, no less). If young adults aspire to make a living playing sports, let them do so wholeheartedly straight out of high school and without the distractions of academia; if that does not work out for them, then they can think about going to college wholeheartedly afterwards.
Also, splitting off sports programs into regional leagues would allow towns and cities to still have their yearly “battles” or ancient rivalries acted out through sports while the colleges and universities could focus once again on their supposed purpose of creating educated, reasoning adults. If an educational institution is to be noteworthy and praised, let it be for the excellent, edifying environment or resources it provides and not for its winning sports teams.
Years ago, a mathematics professor at my university once pointed out that an entire interior wall of a local bank was supposedly dedicated to the university and yet not a single decoration or photo on it had anything whatsoever to do with academics or learning, just sports. For coaches to command salaries of millions of dollars (as per fundamentalist’s earlier comment) while good professors make a fraction of that just goes to show how much more our society values competitive entertainment over education, and that strikes me as a lamentable fact that does not bode well for the future at all.
The whole problem with the BCS and poll system before it was that it is a subjective effort to determine who the “best” team is. That is impossible, partly because of the subjectivity of that measure – the only way to definitively say that a team is the “best” is if no opponent at any time or place could ever beat them. No team has ever met that criteria. But if the criteria is less than that, then subjectivity comes into play and mires the whole process.
A playoff system has a different goal: to determine the champion. In all sports with a playoff system (which is all of them in America and most around the world) once the champion is crowned nobody argues whether they are the champion or not, because champion is a simple, well defined concept. Any team in the league, or their fans, can dispute whether that team was the “best” or how the championship playoff could have turned out different. But nobody disputes who the champion was because that team met a simple set of criteria that were agreed upon before the season even started.
Only college football tries to use highly flawed and biased opinions instead of a rigid mathematical formula to determine their champion. It works in every other sport on the face of the earth, why shouldn’t it work for college football?
[DS] “….The only way to definitively say that a team is the ‘best’ is if no opponent at any time or place could ever beat them…”
I am so happy to read this. I know we’re talking BCS, but I’m often laughed out of the pizza parlor for my pick of the “best” in the NFL.
But we must qualify it, just a little, shouldn’t we? If you confine the “any time” to one season, the “best” has been demonstrated. It was Miami in 1972. I am immediately attacked by the, “What about the great Niners teams of the 80′s? or the Steel Curtain in the late 70′s? Or the ’85 Bears?… They would have killed the Dolphins.”
Woulda, coulda….
It’s a non-sequitur.
I know you AI types are lurking among this site. When you create your robots and machines that will end up arguing philosophy hundreds of years from now, what is the fundamental requirement for your decision matrices? Isn’t it to confine the knowledge base? So too in comparing teams, define the domain and its scope. We can’t say that one team is better than another if they never played eachother. But is there a consistent objective for teams? There is one. Dominance is subjective — that is all about style-points and such rubbish. The objective is not to have the division’s leading rusher or passer. The objective for every single team is to win every single game they play.
We can compare how teams fared within one season against their objectives. For the NFL, all teams have the same objective — win every Sunday. No matter what can be said about the bone-crushing Pittsburgh line, or the take-no-prisoners Bears defense, something happened during their great years. They lost a game. Miami did not. I don’t want to hear about how many points were scored all year, or how few first downs were allowed, because I simply retort: “Yeah, hmmm…. uhhh, they lost a game, though, didn’t they?” In 1972, there was a team, whose objective was to win, not score a zillion points, not to have the fewest points allowed. It was one objective — win the game. After 60 minutes, be the winner of the game. And win they did. Every single game during the confines of a 17-game season. Without exception. No other team in the NFL can say that.
There was one team that would have overtaken Miami as the best ever, because the NFL season became longer. But they choked when it counted most, and which was quite uncharacteristic of their recent history. And since I live in New Hampshire, it will grate on me until the day I die.
I know, in college sports we have the additional problem of too many teams, but they still all have one objective: to win every game they play.
But what about when more than one team is undefeated? Then don’t we need to consider opponents?
At that point, I punt. I say, “No answer. They share the trophy.”
Is there any doubt, then, who my pick is for Division I college? The BCS champion was decided at the Sugar Bowl. This Thursday night’s game is just for fun. : )
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