College Football Playoffs Benefit Everyone--Except Athletes

When it comes to a playoff for college football, it sounds a lot like the weather: Everyone complains about it, but no one does anything.

The Bowl Championship Series was created a decade ago to determine who really was the champion of college football without having to rely on two or three different polls, resulting in two or three different teams declaring themselves the winner.

Instead, the BCS (which includes the Rose, Orange, Sugar and Fiesta bowls held around the New Year's holiday) made things worse by having a one-game playoff between the top two teams as determined by computer (this week it's Alabama and Texas Tech, in that order), while keeping the rest of the bowl games intact. With few exceptions, no school outside the major conferences need apply.

Nobody, it seems, wants to see the system changed. The colleges don't want it because there are already 12 regular season games, and adding more would cut down on class time for those poor 'student-athletes' (which doesn't hold water when applied to other sports, basketball in particular). The major New Year's bowls, most of which have been around since the Great Depression, don't want to be relegated to just another playoff game, not when they've got lucrative conference tie-ins.

Now President-elect Barack Obama is getting in on the debate. On CBS' 60 Minutes Sunday night, the future occupant of the White House advocated a three-round, eight-team playoff with a cutback in regular season games. That would still leave some deserving teams out of the mix, but it's a start.

Our suggestion? A points system. Add four for every victory, three for wins against a nationally-ranked opponent (no more creampuffs), two if you win your conference's championship, and one for each senior on track to graduate. Four points are deducted for every loss, three for losing to a nationally-ranked opponent, two for every player academically ineligible or has discipline problems. Eight teams with the most points gets into the playoffs.

However it's set up, the BCS will make it difficult for folks without cable or satellite to watch its games starting in 2011. That's when its new TV contract with ESPN begins, covering all five bowls. Cable has now gotten to a point where it can outbid the broadcast networks for major sporting events. It helps if one of those cable networks got rid of its competitors the way ESPN got rid of ABC Sports, by becoming corporate siblings (they're both owned by Disney).

And there you have it. Everybody makes money off of the 'student-athletes' who are supposed to decide football championships on the field--the networks, the colleges, and the corporate sponsors who splash their name on every two-bit bowl game. Everybody, that is, except the 'student-athletes' themselves.