New Bowl rankings snub overachievers

The Tulane Green Wave football team is 8-0 and in the midst of a dream season. But the new Bowl Championship Series (BCS) rankings could end it all in horrible injustice.

The BCS, instituted this year, has been touted as the best yet in a series of imperfect solutions to Division I-A college football's biggest problem: the lack of a championship game. The BCS ranks teams by a complex formula combining the traditional writers' and coaches' polls, three computer rankings, strength of schedule, and win-loss record. The two teams that sit atop the BCS rankings at the end of the season will play each other at one of the major bowl games (this year, the Fiesta Bowl), supposedly for the title of national champion. According to the BCS website, this format "will guarantee a match-up between college football's top two teams in a true national championship game."

By combining disparate ranking methods, the BCS resembles a grab bag that offers something for everyone--except teams like Tulane. The Green Wave plays in the relatively weak Conference USA, and its strength-of-schedule ranking is 99th of 112 Division I-A teams. This ranking is not likely to improve, as Tulane's three remaining opponents aren't exactly Florida State, UCLA, and Tennessee. The great weight BCS places on strength-of-schedule rankings--both directly and in the polls--ensures that Tulane will have no chance to play for the national championship. So much for a "true national championship game."

This phenomenon is not a necessary evil of college football. The wide range of conference strength is a fundamental problem that should be solved. Division I college basketball conferences have as wide a range of talent but also have fair and exciting playoffs.

The allure of the basketball tournaments is that every team, no matter how weak its opponents from the regular season, knows its fate is in its own hands. It's trite but true: win your conference and you're in the playoffs. Win six more games and you're national champs. Princeton sent a team into the 1998 men's tournament that believed it could go all the way against teams like Duke and Kentucky. Harvard's women's team went into the 1998 tournament as the lowest seed in its region, and upset top-seeded Stanford.

Princeton, Harvard, and the rest of the Division I-AA Ivy League football teams are unaffected by BCS, but there are teams other than Tulane that stand to be wronged. Wisconsin, Kansas State, and Arkansas are also currently undefeated, but, according to the current BCS ranking, none will play for the national title.

College football must institute a playoff system to solve this problem. Every undefeated team should automatically qualify for the postseason. This does not mean getting rid of the BCS entirely--an 8-team playoff, rounded out by the top-ranked teams which do not qualify under the first two criteria, would strike a good balance between fairness and convenience.

The conferences and bowls have stubbornly resisted the lures of a playoff system for years, citing the difficulty of reconciling the current bowl system with playoffs. Yet in reality, the current system--with its month-long delay between the end of the season and the major bowls and its many corporate-sponsored, irrelevant bowls--is practically screaming for a change.

Should Tennessee, which is currently ranked No. 1 in BCS, clinch a position in the Fiesta Bowl, it will sit idle for more than a month between the Southeastern Conference championship game and the Fiesta Bowl. Instead, in the ensuing weeks, it should be earning its ticket to the championship game by winning playoff games.

These contests could be played at the sites of lesser bowl games like the Insight.com Bowl. I'm sure Tucson fans will be disappointed to miss the exciting matchup between "Big East No. 2 or 3 or Notre Dame vs. Big 12 No. 5."

Somehow, though, I think they'll get over it and go watch undefeated Tulane take on undefeated Tennessee. And I'm sure some Tennessee players would rather be indoors relaxing in front of a fireplace than facing the scorching arm of Tulane quarterback Shaun King '99. But the point of the playoff system is to make teams like Tennessee sweat--and to give teams like Tulane a chance at immortality.

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