Bill James: Boycott the BCS

I don't know that the odds of them having a great game is any better than Texas-Florida or Okhahoma-Utah or whatever.

 

Yes, absolutely. In order to win, you have to show up to play a top-level opponent four straight weeks, and beat them.

Under a playoff scenario, if you lose to a supposed inferior opponent, you cannot stick your chest out and proclaim yourself national champion.

 

Actually, I think he's making the opposite point: the reason the BCS is difficult to understand is because there is not a clear quantitative goal. What do they want the formula to produce? His answer is that it's unclear other than to echo the existing polls.

 

Nothing is truth until Bill James declares it to be.

 

You know, before all this BCS / Bowl Coalition / Bowl Alliance mess, every New Years' Day we had potentially four that did matter. Now we have only one.

One can argue the BCS is stifling what it was designed to do: Protect the bowls.

 

It truly is. And spreading them out so that they don't compete with each other is making them even less special.

They've been shooting themselves in the feet so long they're gonna run out of toes soon.

 

You're 100% correct. Unless a team you're emotionally attached to is playing, there's not a single reason to watch a bowl game on New Year's Day. And then we have meaningless bowl games on the 2nd and 3rd and 4th. By the time the title game rolls around (on the 8th this year) so many people have moved on.

 

Unless you like to watch college football for entertainment as entertainment, which I do. I NEVER have an emotional attachment to any college team.
My enjoyment of the game is not lessened because of what the two teams might or might not be playing for.
If Alabama and Texas Tech no-showed because they weren't playing where they thought they'd be playing, that's on them, not on the system.

 

And how is that different from the past? For gosh sakes, there was one year when the Holiday Bowl (with undefeated BYU beating 6-5 Michigan to clinch the national title in the polls) was the only one that mattered. Orange Bowl to determine (most years) merely whether Nebraska or Oklahoma was better than Florida State or Miami. So what? Big Ten vs. Pac-10 in the Rose Bowl? Tradition and not much else, and that's no different now. Sugar? Merely a chance for the SEC champ to sometimes have a shot at the national title. Really not that much different, no matter which non-playoff system: Virtually every year, only one bowl game will matter.

 

True dat, dools. I do not understand the complaints about bowl games not "mattering."

 

FB, I agree the bowls are just entertainment. The BCS is LESS ENTERTAINING than the old system. The matchups are worse than in the old bowls, and spreading out the games kills my interest to a significant degree. Tonight's game takes place on the day Lexington, Mass DPW picked up discarded Christmas trees. The holidays are over, and the bowls are a holiday product. The BCS title game feels more like a January discount sale run by some retailer a week from Chapter 11.
Plus, in the old system, you had the bowls, then the big argument over who was really number one. Now, the big argument over number one and number two starts in October. I fail to see that as an improvement.
Honest sports would require a playoff. The old bowl system was for entertainment purposes only, and quite OK for that. The BCS offers less entertainment and no honesty.