Time is now for a BCS committee
Do you remember that old George Will quote, about how football combines the two worst elements of America: violence punctuated by committee meetings?
Maybe Will was just mad that some baseball game was pre-empted by the NFL, or maybe he was responding to football pundit Beano Cook’s classic quote about the Iranian hostages receiving lifetime passes to Major League Baseball: “Haven’t they suffered enough?”
Anyway, Will’s football committee referred to huddles. But another kind of gridiron committee is gaining more and more momentum. And should.
Last November, I suggested a seven- or nine-member, basketball-like committee for football replace the kooky Harris Poll in college football’s BCS. Then last winter, the Mountain West Conference’s storm-the-bastille proposal, creating an eight-team playoff, included a 12-person committee to replace the current BCS system.
Whether we tinker or whether we revolt, a committee’s time has come, particularly in the wake of the American Football Coaches Association’s decision to return its poll to star-chamber status. The coaches voted to again make their final ballots secret beginning with the 2010 season.
The coaches’ argument is that some coaches don’t feel the freedom to vote as they wish, because of the public nature of that final ballot. Of course, skeptics would argue that secrecy allows them to vote not as they believe they should, but as they would like to to produce a more desired result, either for their own team, a friend’s team or an enemy’s team.
Time was, the coaches’ vote was the weaker poll. The stately Associated Press ballot, especially after went it went 100 percent public but even before, was much more stable and consistent. The coaches generally followed the AP, only a week later, as if the coaches got their leanings from their fellow poll.
When the AP asked to be removed from the BCS process, and the train-wreck Harris Poll staggered in, the coaches moved up in status. Compounding the problem was the earlier decision to trim the computers’ imput from roughly 50 percent of the BCS to 33 percent.
So what we have now is a colossal mess. Two dysfunctional polls have most of the power in determining the two teams for college football’s national championship. Time for a committee.
Select a cross-section of administrators. Athletic directors, coaches, I don’t care who, just pick well-respected people the same way we fill out the basketball committee. For all the basketball problems, no one really ever has questioned the hoops committee’s integrity. Go with an 11-person committee, one representative from each of the Division I-A conferences.
The committee can take all the relevant information, from polls and computer ratings and strengths of schedule, and select two teams to play in the title game. We would lose some of the weekly drama of the BCS standings release, but we would also lose most of the indigestion when scanning the Harris and coaches polls.
Berry Tramel can be heard Monday through Friday from 4:40-5:20 p.m. on The Sports Animal radio network, including AM-640 and FM-98.1. You can e-mail him here and follow him on Twitter @BerryTramel.
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
No comments yet.
Leave a comment