Atlantic Coast Conference commissioner John Swofford says everything is great with the Bowl Ch
ampionship Series arrangement for determining a champion in college football. Swofford is current head of the BCS governing group which is made up of major conference commissioners plus the Notre Dame athletic director. He reported that the BCS was enjoying "an unprecedented state of health" as they rejected further consideration of any plans for a "plus one" national championship game after the round of BCS bowl games in early January. Only Swofford and SEC commissioner Mike Slive were willing to even talk about the plan any more. All the other conference leaders apparently think everything is hunky-dory and there is no need to even think about doing anything to help the BCS do a better job determining a true national champion.Disclosure: I have never been in favor of doing anything which substantially alters the unique quality of college football where every game during the regular season is exceptionally important. In Major League Baseball, a team which loses only 1/3 of its games is thought to have done exceptionally well. Several times in recent years teams which did not win their own divisions in the regular season have gone on into the playoffs as wild card teams and ended up winning the World Series. In the current NBA playoffs, several teams with losing records made the playoffs. In the last NFL season, the Giants won the Super Bowl after going 10-6 in the regular season. In college football, they would not have been in contention at all with that kind of record. LSU became the first team in almost 50 years to win the championship with two losses! I am strongly opposed to any playoff system which takes that characteristic away from the college football game -- every game must count for something!!!
However, the plus-one system does no harm to that essential quality of college football. In a normal year (which 2007 was not because of an inordinate number of upsets among top teams), the top four teams would either be undefeated or have only one loss. So every game still counts for something and we would have a true national champion. I know teams 5, 6, 7, etc. would argue that they ought to have made the top four -- but, hey, if there are four slots available to compete for the championship, they had their chance. At the very least, no big conference team is going to go undefeated as Auburn did in 2004 and be frozen out of any possibility of winning the championship.
The BCS leaders may think their system is enjoying robust health, but that opinion is not shared by the public or the sports media. I don't know if any polling has been done since Swofford's statement, but I am confident that if the public is surveyed, there will be strong disagreement with Mr. Swofford's optimistic assessment. Perhaps those commissioners need to take off their rose-colored glasses and look at reality.
This isn't a sports blog, so you might rightly expect some kind of application to spiritual matters. It's not unusual for complacent church leaders to approach the situations that exist in congregations much as these football commissioners look at their BCS system. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" is an appropriate idea sometimes. It's even kind of biblical (see Hebrews 8:7), but taken to extreme, it become a rationale to excuse complacency and self-satisfaction. Maybe I'm not taking the statement out of context too much if I quote this phrase from 1 Corinthians 14:12, ". . . strive to excel in building up the church." It's quite easy to get to liking the way things are so much that we are not interested in doing better. Our aim in the way we do the Lord's work should be to excel -- do our very best. Mediocrity is never good enough because the Lord Jesus Christ deserves everything we can possibly give to His service. The BCS should not be satisfied with a mediocre product when they can provide something better. The same thing is true for you and me as we work for the Lord. He deserves the very best!
2 comments:
John,
on BCS:
What do you think has caused the (relatively) sudden demand for a College Football championship?
The polls decided the champion for DECADES and no one seemed to care.
What changed?
on spirituality:
There is a great deal of mediocrity in the church today. I think a great deal of it comes from a poor understanding of our mission. Everyone has a different mission, and everyone thinks they're excelling at THAT mission.
in HIS love,
nick
To answer your first question in a word, Nick, EXPECTATIONS. Under the old system, the top teams negotiated where they wanted to play. In Alabama's heyday, Coach Bryant chose whether he wanted to play in the Sugar, Orange, or Cotton Bowl . . . then everything else fell into place after he made his decision. Sometimes the national champion was chosen by the polls even before the bowls were played, so their outcomes were irrelevant. Even later in the 80s and early 90s, everybody knew the bowls were set up by conference tie-ins so we didn't expect them to produce a national championship game and felt very lucky whenever it happened. The Bowl Alliance of the 90s was an improvement, but it didn't include the Pac 10 or Big 10 so we knew it was unlikely to produce a real national championship when it couldn't include teams like Ohio State, Michigan, or USC. But we expected more with the BCS because it ought to work . . . but more often than not it doesn't live up to expectations. A few times it has provided both worthy opponents and a good game . . . like Texas vs. USC two or three years ago. Last year, there a pretty strong consensus that LSU, USC, and Georgia were the three best teams at the end of the regular season, but only one of them got to play in the championship game. People expect the BCS to yield better results than that and they will continue to be disappointed until the BCS tinkers with its system enough to consistently do what it is supposed to do.
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