Plenty of Flaws in This Game Plan

For all of the excitement generated by the ups and downs of Saturday’s games, the result was a huge setback for the sport.

Tennessee will face Florida State in the Fiesta Bowl, a good enough matchup and a game we can live with. Swapping affable Florida State Coach Bobby Bowden for Kansas State sourpuss Bill Snyder is a positive in itself.

Just don’t applaud too loudly. It will only encourage the bowl championship series folks and move talk of a real playoff system off the back burner and into the cupboard.

Because UCLA and Kansas State lost, we were spared the possibility of an undefeated team being shut out of the championship game. (Unless you count Tulane--but who does? Even their coach bailed on them).

Now it will be impossible to convince Roy Kramer, who is the Southeastern Conference commissioner and coordinator of the BCS, that this system doesn’t work.

“Football is not a tournament sport,” Kramer told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution last week. “And let’s face it, controversy creates attention.”

Enough with that tired old argument that the ruckus stirred by the polls is good for the sport. It sure isn’t good for the players. Ask the 1994 Penn State team if the national debate made them feel any better about being shut out of a national championship despite a perfect record.

And how long does the arguing last? About a week after the bowls. Then everyone forgets about college football and the sporting public’s attention shifts to real competition: the NFL playoffs and the Super Bowl.

A quick test: what’s easier for you to remember, the winner of the 1991 Super Bowl or the two teams that split the college football championship that same month?

And who’s to say the BCS really worked this time? All that happened was instead of excluding a worthy undefeated team it excluded worthy one-loss teams from the championship game. Are we absolutely sure that a Florida State team that lost to 7-4 North Carolina State (which lost to 2-9 Baylor) is better than an Ohio State team that lost to 6-6 Michigan State?

We do know now that UCLA shouldn’t be there. If you give up 689 yards in the most important game of the year, you’ll get nothing and like it.

The only thing I really enjoyed about Saturday’s chain of events was that Arizona didn’t get to go to the Rose Bowl. The Wildcats have never played in Pasadena on New Year’s Day, and it would have been cheap for them to end that streak in a season in which they didn’t win the Pacific 10.

So the Pac-10 champ, UCLA will go. It’s safe to say no team has ever been less excited to play in the Rose Bowl than this group of Bruins. No matter how they’ll try to spin it in the coming weeks, there’s no getting around the fact that all of their dreams this year ended with them walking off the field at the end of the Fiesta Bowl with their index fingers raised over their head.

And because of another weak part of college football, we won’t even get to see UCLA play Ohio State.

At times this season it looked like that would be the matchup in the Fiesta Bowl. It would have been fun to see them meet in the Rose Bowl--even without the national championship at stake--to see how it would have turned out.

Instead we’ll see a rematch of the 1994 Rose Bowl, when UCLA lost to Wisconsin. The only reason the Badgers get to come to Pasadena is because of the Rose Bowl tiebreaker that gives the berth to the team that has gone the longest without making an appearance in the game. (Ohio State played in the 1997 game).

I understand the spirit of the rule, which gives more schools an opportunity to go to the Rose Bowl. But in some cases it punishes teams for having success in the past, while rewarding other schools for years of mediocrity.

The Big Ten needs to get with the program and hold a conference championship game. (They’d have to add Notre Dame first, but that’s another column.)

The atmosphere at the SEC championship in Atlanta on Saturday night was great. The Georgia Dome was packed with 75,000 noisy people, and both teams had ample motivation. A win would put Tennessee in the Fiesta Bowl, while a Mississippi State upset would land the Bulldogs a spot in the Sugar Bowl and its $12-million payout.

Anything that happens in a tournament setting is fair game. It might seem harsh that Kansas State was shut out of the lucrative BCS games, but Texas A&M; beat the Wildcats on the field Saturday to win the Big 12 championship and earned a spot in the Sugar Bowl.

But because the rest of the system is so flawed, Kansas State could have won its game and been on the outside of the national championship hunt.

The NCAA and its member schools can’t use the old length-of-season excuse for not holding a playoff. Not when the championship game will be played on Jan. 4, three days after the traditional conclusion of the season.

We know it’s about the money generated by the bowl system. The best way to change the status quo would be if all the fans who felt their team was shafted simply stayed home. All of those empty seats and the stadiums and empty hotel rooms in the host cities would get the BCS’ attention quickly and make them realize that, no, this is not working.

For those of you wondering, Colorado won the Associated Press poll in 1991 and Georgia Tech won the coaches’ poll.

But all I need to say about the Super Bowl is it was decided on Scott Norwood’s missed field goal, and I’m sure you can figure out the rest.

Too bad nothing in college football is that easy to explain.

J.A. Adande can be reached at his e-mail address: [email protected]