It is officially the season of the outraged interloper in college football. Pundits from all corners of the sports journalism profession love to spend their holidays complaining about the game so many of us hold dear. Whether they have written about or discussed the game at any point during the season is irrelevant and it’s time for everyone to jump on their soapbox. Permit me a moment to climb atop mine.
At the end of the most surprising and remarkable year on record, many have claimed that the bowl matchups leave much to be desired and that playoff brackets are the only solution. Even my friends over at SI.com devoted a series of columns addressing this supposedly broken system. Several weeks ago, they stated that pretty much every college football fan in the nation can agree on at least one thing: The BCS needs a makeover. What followed was an online symposium on how to fix it. But I must beg the question, how broken is this system?
First of all, we do have a playoff. It is a one game, two team playoff for which all I-A teams are eligible. As many people have pointed out, no matter where you draw the line, someone will gripe about their relative worth, saying they deserved to be above the cut line. The greater the number of teams included in a playoff, the more teams can reasonably argue that they belong. The BCS is now ten years old. In those ten years, there has been one and only one team that had a legitimate gripe at their exclusion. In 2004, Auburn went undefeated and finished third. Every other team that was “shut out” lost a game somewhere along the way. If they wanted to point fingers, honest people would have to start with themselves. Did Auburn “get screwed”? Probably. One can only assume they would have fared better against USC than Oklahoma did. But at least their fans didn’t have to sit through Ashlee Simpson’s halftime performance. Small consolation, I know. Adding even two more teams to the mix makes choosing the participants that much more complicated. If there were four this year, who would the other two be? Virginia Tech, USC, Georgia, Hawaii, Oklahoma, Kansas…? You get my point.
Due to its remarkable nature, this season should not be used to make any long-term decisions. That said, didn’t the BCS get it right? Does anyone really have a clear case ahead of the two teams we ended up with? Ohio State lost by one score to an (ahem) BCS bowl-bound team. LSU lost two games in triple overtime and has some pretty darn good wins on their resume. An argument for any other team would require some rather tortured logic.
Both SI.com and ESPN.com had a users “pickoff” where they set up playoff brackets and had people choose who would win hypothetical games. On SI.com, USC defeated Oklahoma. ESPN had the Sooners winning. Let’s say that this is what actually occurred. USC would have become the only team in college football history to win a national championship despite having lost a game at home in which they were favored by 42 points. Oklahoma's resume is hardly championship caliber either. My point is that allowing more teams a crack at ultimate victory is a fundamental change to a sport that has been awarding titles for over 100 years. To institute a playoff with more than two teams means that we are no longer awarding the title to the team that has had the best season, but rather the one that has had a good enough season and is playing the best at the end of the year. Like them or not (and most of you don’t like them), USC is not a title-worthy team. Not according to what the college football national title has meant for the last century. We’ll come back to this point.
In the course of my travels, I’ve met fans from 24 different I-A programs. I’ve been able to note some overarching trends. Regarding the prospect of playoffs, every single person I spoke with aged 28 and under avowed that “we need a playoff.” Fans 29 and older were split, with roughly 70% of them in favor of the current system and 30% demanding playoffs. (Note: At Auburn, it was pretty much 100% playoffs for obvious reasons.) What can we glean from this? Jon from Tennessee pointed out that when the BCS came into existence, people from the younger group were 18 at the oldest. They have essentially been raised in the era of the BCS. However, they’ve also been raised in the era of outraged interlopers. Have they been brought up as frustrated, tortured fans, or has the media persuaded them to be frustrated? Have they really given the concept proper consideration or are they simply repeating what Skip Bayless and Michael Wilbon have told them? It’s a chicken or egg thing to be sure.
A comment I heard frequently from pro-playoff fans was, “Look at the NCAA basketball tournament. It’s great! Who doesn’t think a football tournament would be great?” Certainly, a bracket full of football teams would be exciting. However, no one ever seem to mention the flip side to that coin. What about the basketball regular season? It’s on right now. Are you watching it? Does any of it matter? Compared to say, Rutgers/South Florida? Are you going to watch the Rutgers/South Florida basketball game this year? March Madness gives us all three weeks of excitement and makes Vegas a fortune. But its impact on the regular season cannot be underestimated. I was at LSU/Virginia Tech in Week 2. If we had an eight-team playoff, that game wouldn’t have really mattered. With the BCS, it served as the Hokies’ elimination. You don’t think that added to the excitement level?
What of the Northwesterns, Arizona States, and South Carolinas? Let’s be realistic. These teams will rarely, if ever make a playoff slate of 16 teams. A bowl game is their goal, and if they somehow make it to New Years Day, they’ve had a heckuva season. With a playoff tournament, the lower-tiered bowls would not only lose the small level of relevance they currently hold, the money for them would shrink to the point where we would lose them. Northwestern would have little to play for and their program would likely dry up. If you believe people would still tune in for bowl matchups, my counterpoint to you would be the NIT. It is completely ignored – a consolation game relevant to no one.
I close by simply stating, this is college football. It is different. Every game matters. It’s the difference that makes it the greatest sport on the planet. With even a four team playoff, Ohio State vs Michigan last year would have been just another rivalry game. Kansas vs Missouri this year would have merely been another border war. Ho hum. Interlopers may not understand that it is precisely what differentiates this sport from the others that makes it so incredible. But that’s because they don’t watch it. Not like we do.
Finally, check out this recent article from the Chicago Tribune’s Teddy Greenstein in support of the same argument.
Please feel free to refute, discuss, and argue in the comments section.
The weather report for Saturday was an ominous one. Freezing rain with temps at or below freezing. Lucky for me, my job entailed traipsing around the parking lot, which kept the blood flowing. For nearly everyone else, their job only required wearing purple and tossing back some brews. That led to many hiding out in idling cars to keep warm.
After stuffing my belly like everyone else, I appeared on D3football.com’s pregame show to talk about my road trip. Ideally this will be the first of many broadcasts where I discuss what I have seen and experienced. It was very nice of them to have me on. Hopefully I did a decent job. I haven’t heard a recording yet, so I have no idea how it came off. Anybody tune in? If so, leave a comment or shoot me a note. Anyway, it was great fun, and show host Gordon Mann did a great job of making me feel comfortable and asking good questions. 
We focused mainly on the D-III and the Stagg bowl, and a big topic of conversation was the wide array of fans present in Salem. Aside from the large groups of folks from the two teams playing, I met and talked to people from Christopher Newport University, University of Mary Hardin-Baylor, Huntingdon College, Wesley College, and saw others sporting Randolph-Macon College and Ferrum College gear. What an array! I guarantee you won’t see that kind of participation January 7th in New Orleans. A huge percentage of the people here for this game are simply die-hard Division III fans. Of course they all joined in for 
After having their team photo taken with the championship trophy, in unison the Whitewater team shouted, “Miller Time!” I blurted out, “It’s a Wisconsin thing,” and a woman standing near me said, “That’s right – we don’t drink Budweiser!” Ah, Wisconsin. It’s not quite the “fifth quarter”, but hearing that took me back to 
I’ve got one more drive, and horrible, nasty weather is predicted directly in my path. Looks like it’ll be a long one. I don’t mind. I don’t want this trip to end, anyway.
Perhaps those thoughts gave me extra fuel because I powered well beyond my original goal for the day, not pulling over until a rest stop near Cozad, Nebraska. Having not slept in my car anywhere along the way, and given the fact that it was roughly 5:00 AM, central time, I figured it was high time. This probably would have been a lot more fun in the early part of the season when the temperature wasn’t hovering around 20 degrees. After two hours of bundled up sleep, I awoke to find blocks of ice where my feet should be. The fact that I was wearing shorts (more comfortable for driving) and rather thin socks (hadn’t given that one much thought) were likely to blame. I turned on my car and let it idle with the heat running, wasted gas be damned. At 8:30, I felt refreshed enough and pointed the Corolla eastward. Grandma claimed that I should be home in my apartment by 3:00, the thought of which being all I needed to push me the last 700 miles.
My only conclusion is that God wanted me to extend this road trip by one last day. I’m not complaining. I didn’t have to urgently be home for anything. Had I been a younger man, I may have been foolish enough to soldier on, hoping to make it back to my bed. My final leg passed uneventfully on Friday. I was still ahead of the storm that initially caused concern, and the unexpected one had already passed.
I still had no idea where anything was in Los Angeles, but 
My trip to USC was a bit different than all the others because I had no contacts set up before my arrival. Usually, a blogger or friend of a friend, or a random person I met on the internet acts as a partial host, giving me the tips on what to see and expect. But no matter, at this point, I’ve become quite accustomed to crashing people’s tailgates and sampling their food in addition to their thoughts, feelings and concerns about the wonderful game of college football. 
When I saw an entire lamb turning on a spit, I knew I had to chat with the people doing the turning. In my conversation with a man named Jack, I asked one of my usual questions: “If you could change one thing about the game, what would you like to see be done differently?” After sixteen games at various levels all across the country, Jack was the first person to express his disapproval of the college overtime format. I happen to wholeheartedly agree with him, and have been consistently surprised that nobody else shared this opinion with me earlier. We bonded immediately. I also learned that they squeezed 32 lemons for the lamb’s marinade. I said, “that sounds like a lot of work,” to which the main squeezer replied, “You don’t want to know.” 
The campus was packed with people of all ages, genders, and races, with plenty of UCLA fans to boot. The crowd was in full revelry mode, but in a more laid back fashion than most of the places I’ve visited. That may have been in part due to the home team’s status as heavy favorites, but I have to think that it’s a SoCal thing as well. The diverse fan base meant diverse food as well, and I was lucky enough to sample various meats, many of which were served in tortillas. One Trojan fan chastised my choice of corn tortillas over flour. In Chicago, only the gringos go for flour, but perhaps in LA, things are different. Anyone have an inclination on that? I was also pleased to find Patron and Modelo Especial, a major step up from the Jack Daniels and Coors Light I’ve encountered across the rest of the country. Unfortunately, I never made it back to taste that lamb. I can only assume it was succulent and delicious. 
The Coliseum always looks huge on TV, but in person it has an intimate feel. Their mascot, a white horse named Traveler, sprints down the sidelines chasing a scrawny guy with a flag in his hat who surely runs for the cross country team. The band is quite good, though the sunglasses look comes off as rather cheesy to me. Between the third and fourth quarters, they light the Olympic Torch at the end of the stadium. It’s a pretty sweet tradition that no one else in the country can claim. UCLA played sloppy and erratic. There’s clearly some talent on the team, but they’re so horribly coached that they never stood a chance in this game. The home crowd never really made much noise or seemed overly engaged in the game. I’m sure the Bruins deserve part of the blame. 
The game ended on a four yard run by Hershel Dennis. The last play of my season. No profound thoughts came to me at that point. I’d had my share of wistfulness near the end of the Iron Bowl. But this time I was pretty much just satisfied with the journey. Relieved to be done, and more than anything, glad that I’ve done this. Had UCLA made it more of a game, perhaps there would have been some sort of climactic end for me, but the game just ended and that was that. 
I returned to revel with some of the fans I’d met before the game. They were all pleased and eagerly looking forward to the Rose Bowl matchup against Ohio State. Apparently I missed a pretty significant brawl between friends at the next tailgate over. Nobody knew what sparked the incident, but all who witnessed agreed that it was surprisingly violent. Fight On, indeed.
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