The new BCS logo. Not really, but you get the point.
Image copyright (c) 2013 Vectorportal.
After watching yet another one-sided, life-sucking — but worst of all, boring — championship game, there is really only one conclusion a reasonable, intelligent college football fan can come to:
Somebody needs to drive a stake into this monster.
We need some heroic vampire hunter to rip the lid off the coffin, deliver a witty one-liner, and put an end to this stupidity once and for all. It needs to happen this year, not next. To think that year after year, decade after decade, worthy teams with less popularity have gotten no chance to play for a championship while popular teams get chance after chance. One only has to look at last year’s gift to Alabama — a team that didn’t even win its division — to see that this ravenous beast has gotten way out of control.
Heck, even Notre Dame, despite its undefeated record, should probably have not gotten into the championship.
But, you say, they were undefeated; surely that should get them into the championship game. Well, you only need to look to the years of 2004 (Auburn & Utah), 2006 (Boise State), 2008 (Utah again), and 2009 (Boise State again) to find teams that were undefeated and still were not given a chance to play for the BCS championship. I would posit that nearly any one of those teams would have played better and given a bigger challenge to this year’s Alabama team than the Golden Domers did.
Notre Dame, while they did have a commendable year, have always been media darlings, and this year was no different. Don’t you think NBC might have had some powerful interest in seeing the team they cover exclusively get into the championship game? That brings me to the blood the BCS vampire feeds on: Money.
There is no shortage to the delicious irony that the NCAA, which leaves no stone unturned in their search for wrongdoing involving players, coaches, agents and boosters, seems to virtually ignore the vast sums of money that are influencing the resistance to implement a playoff system. Oh, certainly the people in charge of public relations for the various bowl systems love to say that really, it is in the best interests of the players, it is about tradition, it’s too complicated, it’s just too hard. Right. That is why college football is the only sport in the NCAA system that doesn’t have a playoff.
Hell, the NCAA even has a chess tournament.
I know that this blood-sucker still technically has a year left, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t happen this year. If the public outcry was large enough, it could happen in 2013, in my opinion. That is the only way things get changed in this country; but let’s face it, we have bigger issues to write our representatives about, and sports, even though we feel so much passion for it, is a small-time problem.
All the same, we should all celebrate when this vampire is dead, even if we have to watch it drain our lives and waste our time for one more year.
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Don Gilman is a second-year communications major at Umpqua Community College in Roseburg, Oregon. In addition to writing for FishDuck.com, he has been published in the Roseburg News-Review Newspaper, the UCC Mainstream Newspaper, Bucketlist Publications and is the featured author in the June, 2013 edition of eHorror magazine (under a pseudonym.) In 2013 Don received two awards from the Oregon Newspaper Association’s annual statewide college competition: Third place for Best Feature Story and second place for Best Spot Photography.