College football posteason: Better/Worse since the BCS?

The BCS of course matches No. 1 vs. No. 2 every year in a contrived national title game; Yet such a match-up only occurred seven times between 1968 - the first time the final AP poll appeared AFTER the bowl games - and 1992, the year the Bowl Coalition (forerunner to the BCS) allowed for No. 2 Alabama to flat out embarrass No. 1 Miami.

So while we regularly get the top two teams to settle things, what DON'T get anymore are those crazy years. It seems like ancient history when someone, ranked neither No. 1 or No. 2 in the last regular season poll, sneaked up the ladder when each of the top teams lost on New Year's Day.

Has more been lost or gained with the BCS eliminating such crazy scenarios?

That legendary 1984 Orange Bowl wouldn't even have happened under the current format! Miami was No. 5 and jumped all the way up to No. 1! Texas was ranked No. 2 behind Nebraska that year.

The BCS has created so much more money, attention and viewing exposure for college football, but you can't help but wonder...

 

Worse.

 

Why? It's a horrible, flawed system that needs to be scrapped for a playoff to decide the national champion, but it seems at least marginally better than completely random bowl matchups deciding nothing.

 

Before the BCS there were more reasons to watch more bowl games. Now it all rests on one game and that game usually has at least one team there that is a controversial pick.

The BCS couldn't prevent a split national title.

I liked it better the old way.

 

Were there really reasons to watch bowls before? It's not like more than a couple would have carried weight in the national title race and presumptively - at least most of the time - those would have been BCS bowls plus major ones like the Cotton that still seem to be well thought of.

 

I agree with Mizzou. The old system didn't have all these awful conference tie-ins so that bowls like the Gator Bowl, which used to be kind of a big deal, get a couple of .500 teams with big names like Florida and Ohio State. Also, the old system didn't even pretend that the national champion was anything but a kind of consensus opinion, not a real champion.

 

Yes, Jake, there were really reasons to watch the other bowls before.

I'll take a system where No. 6 beats No.1 in the Sugar Bowl, No. 4 beats No. 2 in the Orange Bowl, No. 10 beats No. 5 in the Rose Bowl and No. 3 beats No. 6 in the Fiesta Bowl and becomes National Charmion over a system that makes those four games meaningless.

 

I've said this before, but I remember Jan. 1, 1986.

UCLA knocks Iowa out of the title race in the Rose Bowl
Michigan beats Nebraska in the Fiesta Bowl
Tennessee crushes Miami in the Sugar Bowl
Oklahoma beats Penn State in the Orange Bowl

More or less, all four of those games played into who would be the eventual national champion.

I'll take that every time over the current system.

 

OK, so the argument is that what are now the BCS bowls were great but are now effectively neutured by the BCS? I can see that I guess. When I was making my point about the bowls I was thinking more along the lines of the ridiculous bowl season that has already begun.

 

Maybe things always just seemed better when you were younger, but does anybody else remember when the Orange Bowl, played on New Years Night, was just a dynamite game year in and year out?

 

Other than the title game, the bowls are just as worthless now as they were before the BCS. And there are more of them, involving more mediocre or worse teams (hey, you used to have to have a winning record to get a bid, right?). Therefore, the postseason is worse than before.

 

I remember the halftime show always seemed to take an hour and a half.