Are the players visiting the beer garden?
There’s a dispute brewing about a bar at the University of Wisconsin’s football stadium. City leaders in Madison say they are concerned that the beer garden at the Stadium Bar and Eatery is being packed beyond capacity and that proprietors there aren’t doing enough to clear the place out by the mandatory 10 p.m. clear-out deadline on game days. Now, there’s something to be said about having a bar at your football stadium of choice. Your team’s winning? Raise a glass in celebration. Your team’s getting roundly beat down? Raise a glass in disbelief. Then again, Wisconsin’s football team is in a free-fall at the moment, losers of four in a row after starting the season with three straight wins. Maybe the players there have become a little too familiar with the Stadium Bar and Eatery.
Speaking of college football, the Bowl Championship Series is all the rage around these parts. The Thirsty Beagle would like to go on the record to say that while all this BCS talk is fun, he is a big proponent of a college football playoff. That belief was solidified even more when during a recent visit to the official BCS Web site, I found these ”news headlines” about the BCS:
• Playoff taking place right now
• Officials: BCS too healthy to change
• No desire to see BCS format grow
• Playoff smayoff! We don’t need it
I lifted those clearly non-self serving ”headlines” straight off the Web site www.bcsfootball.org. The most common argument for not instituting a playoff — after all the lame arguments about “too many games” and “what about the history and tradition of all the bowls” and so on are exhausted — is that somehow a playoff would devalue college football’s regular season. Well you know who feels devalued? An undefeated Auburn team that didn’t get a sniff of the national title game. But don’t worry Auburn, the BCS said you didn’t deserve a chance to play for the title because some people — coaches, people who make computer programs — decided they didn’t feel like you did. No matter how you want to break it down, that simply is how it worked. The BCS is a random process based on the random opinions of some random (Hello, Schnelly!) people. That, my friends, is a devaluation of the regular season at its utmost. And that is why the BCS needs to go.
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