For fans of college football — especially fans of those two football programs — this will be a major event, as it always is.
And there are all sorts of story lines:
- Quarterback Greg McElroy is the key to Alabama's fortunes, writes Jennifer Floyd Engel of the Fort Worth Star–Telegram.
- Kevin Sherrington of the Dallas Morning News says that Texas quarterback Colt McCoy needs to channel his "Heisman snub" the way Vince Young did four years ago.
- If you believe in the adage that defense wins championships, tonight's game will validate your position, says Kirk Bohls of the Austin American–Statesman.
- Vincent Bonsignore writes, in the Los Angeles Daily News, that the Longhorns better have more protection from their offensive line than they did when they yielded nine sacks to Nebraska in the Big 12 championship game last month.
- Bill Plaschke of the Los Angeles Times is convinced the Tide will roll.
- Meanwhile, Don Kausler Jr. of the Birmingham News wonders if Alabama can rise to the occasion the way it did against Florida in the SEC championship game.
But the story line that really interests me comes from Jay Mariotti of FanHouse. Mariotti says — bluntly — "The BCS is B.S."I agree.
I believe the BCS system is a sham. A real playoff system is needed. Every other college sport has a playoff system in place, including football — with the exception of Division I.
Until the mid–1960s, the NFL kind of did things the way the NCAA does now. It may be hard for many modern NFL fans to imagine, but it wasn't until 1967 that the NFL introduced a first round to the playoffs (after subdividing the league into four divisions instead of the two it had previously). Before that, the NFL champion (and, until 1969, the AFL as well, although a tie in the standings forced a divisional playoff the year before) was decided in a single–game postseason.
The wild–card concept was not introduced until the NFL–AFL merger, and over the years, the playoffs have continued to expand. Today, I doubt that you would find an NFL fan who would think it was satisfactory to decide on the Super Bowl entrants by pairing the top two teams in each league — and the NFL has 32 teams.
Tonight's game is supposed to decide the champion of college football's Division I, which has more than 100 members.
But college football doesn't permit a playoff system. It takes the winners of two big–name conferences and puts them on the same field, and they play each other for the national title. Supposedly, this is an improvement over the old system, in which pollsters chose the best team after the bowl games had been played.
Well, the only thing the BCS has done is guarantee that the top two teams (according to computerized rankings) face each other. In some eyes, that passes for improvement. More than once in the last month, I have heard it said that, in the old days, a top–ranked Alabama team and a second–ranked Texas team would not have played each other. Alabama would have gone to the Sugar Bowl, as SEC champions always did, and Texas would have gone to the Cotton Bowl, as SWC champions always did. They probably would have played inferior teams. They probably would have won. And the issue of which team deserved to be the national champion would not have been resolved.
But in the old days, more than two teams entered the New Year's Day bowl games with a chance at being national champion. I am reminded of 1978, when Heisman Trophy winner Earl Campbell and the University of Texas appeared poised to win the national title but lost the Cotton Bowl to Notre Dame, which was, if memory serves, ranked fifth.
That opened the door for another team to grab the national title, but the schools that were next in line all stumbled. When college football fans went to bed that night, there was a lot of suspense over which team would be #1. And, lo and behold, when the pollsters cast their votes the next day, Notre Dame had climbed from fifth to first.
Frankly, I preferred that to the BCS nonsense. On Jan. 2, 1978, fans who had tickets to the Sugar, Rose and Orange bowls started the day believing the national title would be claimed in Dallas. When that did not happen, the games in New Orleans, Pasadena and Miami all took on new meaning.
It wasn't a playoff, but it was better than the current system, in which we have nearly three dozen bowl games, but none of them matter to anyone besides the teams playing in them and their fans.
The only postseason college football game that everyone pays attention to is the one that will be played tonight, but the teams that play in it didn't have to earn their way in, as the schools that play for national titles in college basketball or college baseball or college hockey must do.
It can be argued that Alabama, like the challenger in boxing, earned its way in (sort of) because it had to knock off the defending champion. But the same cannot be said of Texas. In the Big 12 title game, the Longhorns barely got by a Nebraska team that lost three games during the regular season.
Of course, in the NCAA Tournament, the top–seeded teams start things off by playing the worst teams in the tournament field — but the quality of the competition gets better the deeper one goes. By the time the two finalists meet, they have been challenged by the best teams that are left — and few people can make a legitimate claim that either team did not deserve to be there.
Perhaps Alabama and Texas would have survived a college football playoff and met in tonight's championship game, anyway. We'll never know.
But until college football has a real playoff system, the questions about the legitimacy of the champion will persist.
The BCS has done nothing to change that.
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