I’ve long been an advocate of waiting until after the bowl season to begin a college football playoff, and this season’s results are a vivid demonstration as to why. If we went back to traditional tie-ins for the bowls, then selected four teams when it was over, we would have both a more entertaining system and a fairer bracket. Let me explain why.
The NFL playoffs might take over the sports world for this weekend, but college bowl season still goes each day. It starts Friday night with a Cotton Bowl matchup that’s as good as any of the major bowl games, and then has lower-tier games on Saturday & Sunday, in the time slots that wrap around the four NFL first-round playoff games.
I know the media reaction today is about the Alabama dynasty and how it ranks with the best of all time. I guess I’m still going to go down fighting on the whole question of Tide dominance, because I see this as less about how good Alabama is, then whether the SEC really has made this whole bowl season a pointless endeavor and what it means for college football.
This past Saturday night I was in Lucas Oil Stadium for the Big Ten Championship Game with a friend of mine. As Wisconsin’s 70-31 pounding of Nebraska got out of control, we started to look at the BCS rankings on his I-phone to see if there was any chance Northern Illinois could make it to the Orange Bowl.
We identified teams the Huskies they would have to pass in the rankings to achieve automatic qualifying status. The five battleground states, if you will, were identified as Kent, UCLA, Texas, Michigan and Nebraska. NIU had to win four of the five battles. This also assumed the Huskies—21st coming into the week—would nudge past #20 Boise to become the top midmajor on the board. With most of the experts, like CBS Sports’ Jerry Palm and ESPN’s Brad Edwards still saying NIU would come up short, and even non-expert locales like this site feeling this way on Friday, as we examined the data on Saturday night, Northern Illinois’ path suddenly looked open.