by Brad Sullivan

It’s been an incredible NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament this season, and the Final Four should be no exception. When you look at this year’s remaining teams, there are two teams that very few had advancing to this stage.

VCU and Butler have punched their ticket to Houston by taking down some of the highest-ranked, talent-flush teams in college basketball. The strong play of these underdogs proves once again that a playoff system is the best way to determine a champion. It is the most equitable method to determine who should take home the trophy.

In college football, the opportunity to win a national championship is only available to those who run in the same circles. A school must belong to a BCS conference to even be considered. Meanwhile, NCAA basketball shares the same equitable method to determine a champion as Division II Football, Division III Football, women’s field hockey, squash, and every other NCAA sport. You can get hot at the right time, make a run, and win a title. It’s the American way!

Unfortunately college football is more of a mafia cartel. The teams without the name will never have a chance to get hot and make a run due to the BCS. You’d think John Gotti himself set it up.

With the NFL in a lockout, College Football has a great opportunity to make some headway increasing their fan base, and what better way to grab more fans then by creating a playoff system?

We all know this won’t happen without pressure from the fans, but it would be epic. You would see some smaller programs get hot at the right time and run the table.

The fans will continue to be forced to watch lopsided routes and terrible teams play each other in terrible tradition-less bowl games rather than experience all the excitement and fairness of a single elimination playoffs system.

Michael Bradley Sullivan serves as an SFC Sportswriter Fellow. He is a senior broadcast journalism major at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. He was born and Raised in Corpus Christi, Texas. He is a fan of the Texas Tech Red Raiders, the Dallas Cowboys, and the San Antonio Spurs. Follow him on twitter here.

Well, you can’t have a solution if there’s no problem, right? 

Executive Director of the Bowl Championship Series Bill Hancock argues there is no problem, but the public polls tell us that there indeed is an issue to be resolved. The inequitable BCS allows the rich and powerful to govern themselves on the public dime, and one man that fits that bill is joining the seemingly powerless majority. 

Read how Mark Cuban plans to change college football as we know it here.

The Grand Old Bowl Tradition – Bunk! – Part 2

by Mike Felten

(continued from 12/12/10 – The Grand Old Bowl Tradition – Bunk! – Part 1)

The traditions of other major bowl games have already been trumped by commerce.

The first experience that I had attending a major bowl was the Orange Bowl. I booked myself in a hotel that assured me that they were close to the stadium. They were honest with me, but I assumed that the Orange Bowl game would be played at the Orange Bowl. I still think that was a reasonable assumption. From 1938-1995 I would’ve been correct.

It had been the home of five Super Bowls and where teams of the Big XII (and it’s precursors) hoped to wind up.

Of course, tradition be damned, they moved the Orange Bowl away from the stadium with the same name to a stadium that has more aliases than a petty felon from Joe Robbie to Landshark to Sun Life.

I do know that it is a long cab ride from the airport in Miami. It is quicker and cheaper to fly into Fort Lauderdale.

The Cotton Bowl has also moved from the Cotton Bowl. I haven’t quite figured out if the Cotton Bowl Classic is like the new Coke or the old one. The Jerry Jones venue is on the verge of making a bid to join the BCS championship series. Tradition has already been sufficiently trampled.

The Oklahoma-Texas series has managed to upgrade the old stadium and keep the Red River Rivalry in the middle of the Texas State Fair.

The Cotton Bowl parade has suffered. Cotton is no longer king in Dallas. The parade in 2002 was a couple of high school marching bands parading around the shuttered fairgrounds. The Arkansas Razorback band led their fans to one end of stadium and the Pride of Oklahoma band led it’s followers to a pep rally on the other side.

It wasn’t the old Cotton Parade that used to wind through downtown Dallas and televised on national TV.

The phenomena of the female drill teams were the signature cachet of the parade, particularly the Kilgore College Rangerettes. They are kind of the June Taylor dancers with wooden rifles.

They have no home on the freeway leading to Arlington where the new stadium is. At least, the parade looks like it has returned to downtown Dallas. It won’t be the going up against the Rose Parade in the New Year’s Day TV ratings though.

The Fiesta and the Sugar Bowls have been similarly moved and shaped into place. If you equate tradition with a five-year old luxury condo, we have it in place.

The “bowl tradition” is a tradition in name only. Florida State’s Chief Osceola and the Sooner Schooner were banned from the field in the 2000 championship. School bands don’t make the television half time show. You might get a glimpse of the Texas Aggie band, but the traditions of individual schools are always pre-empted by the network talking heads.

Tradition has been trampled out of the games for years. So let’s not let that be forwarded as an excuse to prevent us from achieving a true national championship series.

Mike Felten is an SFC sportswriter fellow. He is a music industry veteran, a performer, and owner of the Landfill Records, the former Record Emporium, navigating the transitioning areas of intellectual property and musicians rights. Born and raised in Chicago, Mike is a long time Chicago Cubs fan and a Oklahoma Sooners booster.

It’s over now. #1 played #2 and #1 was victorious.

It was a great game, with a little of everything in it for college football fans – interceptions, injuries, trick plays, and heartwarming stories of players who faced adversity and kept going.

However, there was something just not right about it.  This is not the game we should have had.

It has been over a month since the BCS, aided by computers (what would we do without them?), decided which two teams would face each other in its don’t-call-it-a-national-championship game. There were four more Saturdays of college football in which the fans could have had the playoff that included all of the best teams in football, not just those ordained by a group of insiders deadset on protecting their million dollar paychecks.

Joe Paterno said it best in a recent interview with ESPN. “We must have a championship game. We get forgotten after we finish the season. I don’t like the BCS. I think we need a playoff.”

The team with even one loss gets forgotten because their fate is decided immediately upon the regular season’s end. And what’s worse for teams that are not in an elite conference such as Penn State, even with a perfect season, a mid-major will be similarly exiled. Just ask Boise State how they felt after beating TCU in the anticlimactic Fiesta Bowl.

As responsible sports fans, we want the college football season to last with an eye toward keeping our school’s athletes healthy – but with meaningful games leading up to the crowning of a true champion.

Without a playoff in the month of December, we will never know. If that means Alabama doesn’t play Jack State in September, so be it. We’d rather see an Alabama-Florida playoff rematch then the Florida-Charleston Southern blowout in Week 1.

Picking the final two teams for NCAA Football’s top prize  shouldn’t include a debate of what clique they hang out in. In this new decade, let the champion be decided on the field.

The pressure is coming to bear on the BCS to change their ways. Momentum is building from fans and sports media and it is reaching the point where it is very likely that College Bowls will be “flushed” and playoffs will be instituted.

We are at a real tipping point. It has been said that there are 3 types of
people in the World; those people who make things happen; those people who watch things happen; and those people who never knew what happened. SFC needs people who make things happen and we need you now.

Together with your help, SFC can help put a stake in the heart of the BCS. We
need you to join SFC to help us help you make this happen. We are so close
to bringing equity and fairness to college football. A success in killing
off the bowl system will empower the fan to realize many more
accomplishments in areas like blackouts of games, ticket pricing, stadium
funding, etc.

Let’s double up our efforts today to help bring real change to college
football.