The BCS Isn't About Football

The BCS isn't about the football
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
The Oregonian

With Sunday's release of the first set of Bowl Championship Series standings we can dispense with the disingenuous fiction that the BCS system enhances the importance of the regular season.

BCS apologists claim every regular-season game is like a playoff round, because one loss can knock you out of the running for the national championship.

Not true for Ohio State, blown out by USC this season 35-3 and ranked ninth in the BCS standings.

Not true for USC, beaten at Oregon State this season and ranked fifth in the BCS standings.

Not true for Oklahoma, beaten by Texas this season and ranked fourth in the BCS standings.

It is true for schools from the non-power conferences. That explains why Brigham Young, which suffered its only loss of the season to Texas Christian, is 21st.

TCU (7-1) is ranked No. 15 by The Associated Press and no slouch. Losing on the road to the Horned Frogs shouldn't be a disgrace, but that didn't help BYU.

I think Oregon State is ill-served by the BCS, too. More on that later.

The real purpose of the BCS is for the six major conferences (Atlantic Coast, Big East, Big Ten, Big 12, Pacific-10 and Southeastern) and the major bowl games (Fiesta, Orange, Sugar and Rose) to hog as much of the postseason money and television exposure as possible.

A playoff system, particularly one including 20 teams -- the Championship Subdivision (I-AA) moves to a 20-team playoff in 2010 -- would threaten this monopoly. So the bowls and the BCS conferences fight like cornered rats any time a playoff is proposed.

To prevent it, college football's fat cats created a Byzantine set of rules slightly more complicated than the federal tax code, using two polls and six computer rankings to determine the two teams to play for the national title.

BYU and TCU belong to the mid-major Mountain West Conference. Unless the stars align perfectly, neither ever will get a sniff at the BCS title game.

Utah (8-0), another Mountain West member, probably won't either, even though the Utes have beaten Oregon State, the team that beat USC. The Mountain West is 8-5 this season in games against schools from BCS conferences.

The Mountain West gets snubbed not because of anything that happened on the field, but because it doesn't contain a Los Angeles or San Francisco-sized television market.

The supposedly objective, nonemotional, entirely rational computer component of the BCS rankings often is unintentionally hilarious. Take this week, when the computer average ranked Ohio State fifth and USC 10th.

Talking to reporters Sunday, USC coach Pete Carroll asked: "How does that happen?"

How, indeed.

Of course, college football programs are not static. The Buckeyes were missing their best running back and starting a different quarterback when USC took them apart in September. Maybe Ohio State is worthy now.

Which brings us to the Beavers. Oregon State (4-3) started slowly, losing a close game at Stanford, getting pounded at Penn State and losing another nail-biter at Utah.

The Beavers often start slowly. They don't match up well in the recruiting wars because of their relatively remote campus and limited resources.

Coach Mike Riley and his staff compensate by doing an exceptional job of locating and evaluating prospects others have missed. Then they develop their long-shot recruits into good major-college players.

It's not always a quick process, but the Beavers seem to improve as much as anybody from the first quarter of the opener to the fourth quarter of the bowl game. By the end of the season, Riley's teams usually are as dangerous as coiled rattlers.

That doesn't mean much when a three-loss team has been shunted out of the BCS picture by the first week of October. But if the Beavers were to run the table this year and finish 9-3, it's interesting to wonder what they might do in a 20-team playoff.

It's a pipe dream. Slow-starting teams that finish fast have about as much chance of crashing the sterile BCS world of polls and computer programs as a mid-major.

But OSU does have one advantage over BYU and TCU.

As members of the Pac-10, the Beavers get a chunk of Rose Bowl loot no matter how well they finish. As the BCS teaches us, it's not about the football.

It's about the money.
Ken Goe: 503-221-8040; kengoe@news.oregonian.com