Florida State’s recent win over Auburn in the BCS National Championship Game marked the end of two overlapping eras. In the first, they became the first school not from the Southeastern Conference (SEC) since Texas in the 2006 season to win the championship, beating an SEC opponent in the process. Indeed, Auburn won the title in 2010. The second era that closed with this result is that of the Bowl Championship Series. It’s been interesting, it’s been controversial and it’s even been fun at times. But for many college football fans, the system had to go.
Next season, the world will be introduced to a new four-team playoff system in which a 13-member selection committee made up of athletic directors of big schools, former coaches and even former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will determine the top four schools over the season and let them duke it out — no super-complicated conference tie-ins, no strange computer rankings, just who this collection of minds thinks deserves it most. Will it be perfect? Probably not, as most fans will find a way to argue that their team was snubbed or that another team was undeserving. But it’s an improvement.
Strangely enough, though, the BCS’s swan song was perhaps the best year of its existence, in terms of game quality it gave us. It started off with the Rose Bowl, where Michigan State put more than two and a half decades of suffering behind it with a great win over powerhouse Stanford, keyed by a crucial fourth-down stop. This was followed by the Fiesta Bowl, featuring two BCS debutants in Central Florida and Baylor. UCF, big-time underdogs given their small-conference status, got off to a fast start and never looked back in scoring a high-profile victory.
The upsets kept rolling in with the Sugar Bowl, as Alabama followed up their heartbreaking loss to Auburn by falling flat against Oklahoma, with the game sealed by an AJ McCarron fumble returned for a touchdown. Finally, the Orange Bowl saw Clemson take down Ohio State, which hadn’t lost in two seasons before losing to Michigan State a month earlier. Four upsets based on rankings and general prestige, and Auburn was 13 seconds away from making it a clean five out of five.
We’re not going to see anything like this again. Remember when Boise State — that school nobody ever heard of that plays on a blue turf field in the middle of nowhere in Idaho and competes against less prestigious opponents to rack up easy wins — took down the almighty Oklahoma? Remember how they did it, with a trick play to tie the game with 10 seconds left, another to score in overtime and a third to win the game with the subsequent two-point conversion? We’re not going to see anything like that again.
Schools like UCF, Boise State and Hawaii won’t have another chance to make such a big impact. The new system allows for these teams to get a shot at bowls like the Fiesta, Cotton or Chick-fil-A if they don’t get into the playoff, which is unlikely due to lower prestige meaning lower initial ranking. But they only can if those bowls aren’t being used in the playoff that year. It’s a shame given the pride that these so-called “smaller” schools put into their programs, which really show in their play on the national stage.
On the flipside of this, however, is the long-awaited arrival of the playoff system. Of the six bowls discussed — Rose, Sugar, Orange, Cotton, Fiesta or Chick-fil-A — two will be used as semifinal matchups, with the winners of those games advancing to the title game. The other four bowls will pull from the best of the rest, with some conference tie-ins. The two games used rotate each year in pairs, based on the order just listed. So next season, the Rose and Sugar Bowls will be the semifinals, while in 2016, the Orange and Cotton Bowls will have the honors. It’ll bring an even higher profile to these already star-studded matchups, with these teams having something to play for beyond the glory of winning the Rose Bowl, which is pretty great in itself.
The biggest key, though, is the idea that the new system will give a more true representation of who the best teams in the nation are. Under the BCS system, the rankings are determined by three separate institutions: the American Football Coaches Association, research group Harris International and a set of computers that tabulate rankings based on a number of factors. These three combine to give us some really wacky-looking things. For example, in the last BCS standings before the bowl games, BCS No. 14 Arizona State was ranked 17th by both human polls but 11th by the computer aggregate. Three computers had the Sun Devils ranked in the top 10. Southern California, not ranked in either human poll, snuck in at No. 25 in the BCS by virtue of two computers ranking them in the top 20.
In my mind, having a solely human panel deciding these rankings makes them much fairer. Computers can take in statistics and win-loss records all they want but only humans can watch the game, see just how well teams play in certain situations — be it over a single game or a stretch of games — and determine who really is the best of the best. It’s not just down to raw talent, either; if that were the case, we’d probably see four SEC schools in the playoffs every year due to their general recruiting power. No, it comes down to performances. Week in, week out, does a hypothetical undefeated UCF or Northern Illinois or whoever from a mid-major look more convincing on the field than a one-loss Auburn or Michigan State or Stanford?
The 13 men and women tasked with fleshing these questions out certainly have a lot on the line, and will most definitely be under severe scrutiny from not just the media, but from the fans of the teams who might be on the bubble for a playoff position. Maybe it’ll take a little while to get used to this system, as it did with the BCS. Only time can tell whether it works as well as we thought it would or not. The point is, a March Madness-style, though not as big, playoff is always going to be more exciting than computer-generated matchups, but the possibility that the little guy might miss out leaves a little to be desired.
