Points East
GAINESVILLE, Fla. - They welcomed the New Year with Boilermakers in Tampa and Hurricanes in Jacksonville. BCS a poor
substitute
for tournamentMeanwhile, I finished off the 1999 egg nog and surfed six bowls at home, leaving the tube only for an occasional visit to a seventh.
Twelve hours later, I had digested bits and pieces of the Outback, Cotton, Gator, Citrus, Rose and Orange bowls, and was left with one conclusion:
Some really stupid things are done in the name of tradition.
Why do we subject ourselves to this year after year? Even if you truly love football or are a degenerate gambler (I was at one time a member of both groups), there are better things to do on the first day of a new year than watch a bunch of teams play for what amounts to 5th-through-16th place.
What else does it really settle? What does it accomplish, besides huge payouts to the participating schools? The only bowl game that deserves any serious attention is tomorrow's Sugar Bowl, which was predetermined to be the national championship game.
Back in the day (way before anyone said "back in the day"), more than one bowl game a year actually meant something. Even if your favorite team wasn't playing on Jan. 1 in the Pre-BCS (Bull Crap System) Era there was more at stake on New Year's Day than who would mispronounce more names, Keith Jackson or Brent Musburger. A little thing called the National Championship was on the line.
I don't know what's worse - having a vote for No. 1 (then), or having it partly determined by computers (now). I just know that both are bad, and both systems encourage running up scores - a concept that is even infecting the NFL and its playoff system now.
This is certainly not the first rant you've read or heard clamoring for a playoff system to determine No. 1 in college football. And it won't be the last. Maybe you are tired of the complaints, maybe you like the current system.
BUT look at it this way. If you are a Hawaii football fan, you have had more than a week to bask in the glory of the Rainbows' Oahu Bowl victory on Christmas Day.
By now, you should be feeling a little unsatisfied.
Conceivably, because there are 23 bowl games, UH was considered one of the best 46 teams in the nation heading into the bowls. Now, in basketball, if you are one of the top 64 teams and you win a postseason game, you get to keep playing until you lose one, or you win the national title.
OK, so a 64-team football tournament is impractical for oh-so-many reasons.
Yes, folks, unfortunately, any college football tournament in the foreseeable future will have to be completed on a PlayStation.It cuts too much into the student-athletes' study time in January, when all those guys who have declared for the NFL draft need to master Accounting 450SL so they can balance a seven-figure checkbook.
The best we can hope for is that the BCS computers are not Y3K compliant, and we'll get a playoff in a thousand years.
Dave Reardon, who covered sports in Hawaii
from 1977 to 1998, is a sportswriter at the
Gainesville Sun. E-mail reardod@gvillesun.com