There's something seriously wrong with college football. Nowadays the NCAA's relationship with the Bowl Championship Series has gone past the awkward first date period and straight into a very serious commitment that, due to the financial success of college football, is too difficult to dump.
Good press is as necessary as good play in the BCS as champions are decided on a mutual intake of performance and speculation. And what makes the BCS even worse is that on some level, the average college football fan is required to like it. Required because before the BCS, the nearly 100-year-old bowl system was all fans had to crown their champion. The press would simply vote on a national champion at the end of the year.
The major problem with the BCS is that it is a flawed system that judges largely based on perception and not actual worth. The system itself consists of a computer score comprised of various statistics including home/loss records and strength of schedule. It also consists of human rankings to formulate a final BCS total. The computer score used to be the large factor in judging whether a team would go to the national championship, however due to fears that the system would improperly place a team in the championship game, those in college football made the rankings provided by human voters the most significant factor in the overall BCS (2/3 influence). The human polls are the Harris Interactive Poll and the USA Today Coaches Poll.
The problem is that these polls are all based on bias, which destroys the chances of various teams throughout college football, including ASU. That's because many of these writers already have the idea that the conference they cover somehow plays a better brand of football than any other conference.
Writers are full of contradiction. For example, look at the No. 3 through No. 5 spots of the current BCS poll. At No. 3 we have the only non mid-major undefeated team, the Kansas Jayhawks, followed by Oklahoma and Missouri, all of the Big XII. What makes no sense is how the voters can somehow discredit Kansas and the Big XII by not having the undefeated Jayhawks in the top two, while somehow maintaining the validity of the Big XII by placing Kansas's TWO one-loss counterparts in the top five.
Because of writer bias, a successful football program needs successful marketing, nationwide, as well as good gridiron football to actually get noticed. Part of the problem is that when ASU finally was put the national spotlight, it lost! Not their fault considering they faced Dennis Dickson and Oregon, but other than Oregon, UCLA and WSU, all of ASU's games have ended past midnight on the east coast, which makes it hard for a majority of the country's voting sportswriters to follow ASU's games.
Maybe that's why one loss-WVU is ahead of ASU, even though they lost to a team not in anyone's top 25 (Southern Florida), or why one loss Oklahoma is ahead of ASU even though they lost to a team ASU already beat (Colorado), or maybe that's why even one loss LSU is ahead of ASU, even after they lost to then unranked and now number 23 Kentucky. Since these teams got the press before and during the season, then they will keep getting the press and the votes so long as we have a ranking system that pushes hype over substance.
Until we make the game face more important than the public face, teams left and right will always get snubbed. If we are going to give writers the ability to alter outcome of the BCS and the championship, then there must be equal and accountable representation of every conference in contention. Until then, we'll be waiting for that playoff.
Reach the reporter at: joshua.spivack@asu.edu.
