Book Review: Death to the BCS

I finally found a book that I enjoyed reading. This book came out on the 14th of October and once I got it I could not put it down. For those of you who are college football fans, I would recommend this book.

Death to the BCS is a book that calls for college football reform. It explains the corruptiveness of the BCS, and takes all the counter-arguments that the BCS executives use against a playoff and makes them sound ridiculous. The first chapter explains the reasons why the executives of the BCS won't give up their power for a playoff. These executives are getting paid millions of dollars to put on these bowls, and might receive a cut in their paycheck if they were to go to a playoff. The second chapter is the authors' proposal for a 16-team playoff that was very similar to what my proposal was:

1. 16- team playoff with each conference champion receiving an automatic bid.
2. Remaining five teams are selected by a selection committee and then re-ranked
3. All the games except the national championship will be played at the higher seeds' home field

They explain that under this system the conferences would roughly make around $25 million for each game one of their teams plays in. They explain that under this system that conferences like the SEC would have made close to eight times more money than they did under the BCS!

The BCS argues that they don't want a playoff to keep the sacredness of the regular season. They say that if there is a playoff, then there will be some teams who know that they will be selected in the playoffs and will slack off during the regular season. They argue that the regular season will not mean as much as it does now. This is a ludicrous argument, because seeding will be so important in the playoffs that they can't afford to take a game off. The difference between a #3 and a #4 seed is the difference between playing a crappy CUSA opponent and a much better at large bid like LSU. The difference between a #2 and #3 seed is one extra game that you'll get to play at home. Another argument for this will now produce more competitive matchups. Under the BCS format you can only get into the championship with zero or one loss. So now all these powerhouse teams are scheduling crappy opponents to gurantee that there are no screwups. With the playoff format they will be able to schedule more competitive games, thus making the season more entertaining to watch.

Next to that agrument my next favorite argument was how corrupt the current system is at choosing who gets to play in the national championship. Last year there were five undefeated teams at the end of the regular season. Alabama, Boise State, Cincinnati, Texas, and Texas Christian, and only two of them got to play for the national championship. Someone needs to tell me how that is fair. Throw out strength of schedule, because these teams cannot control who they play. Right now the BCS is comprised of three elements. The Harris (media) poll, the USA Today coaches poll, and a computer ranking. In this book it told how each of the undefeateds were fighting for that #2 spot so bad that the coach of Texas Christian voted his team #2 and Cincinnati #8. Cincinnati voted their team #2 while they voted Texas Christian #14. I'm not 100% sure on their exact poll location but it was something close to that. So instead of people voting for who they truly think is the best team, coaches and alumni are voting their teams #1 and voting all of the competition way down the list. The computer polls get me the most because they don't factor in margin of victory in their rankings. Sure, having margin of victory being factored in would motivate teams to run up the score, but it would be better than what the computers do now. This year when the first BCS rankings were released, Oklahoma was ranked #1 in the computers, but what it didn't realize was that Oklahoma had barely beat a crappy Utah State team by seven and Air Force by three. Boise State has slipped in their polls because of Oregon State losing to Washington, but the computer doesn't see that Oregon State lost by 1 in double overtime in Washington and without their star receiver.

There are plenty of other arguments that this book contains that I could not agree with more. This is the way a college football post season should be played. I loved this book and was glad I bought it, and I know that if you are remotely interested in college football and know a little bit about the system it is run under, you would love this book too.