A Proposal for the BCS

I hate the BCS. I think it’s absurd and inane and represents everything that is wrong with college athletics. Like it or not, though, it doesn’t appear to be going anywhere, and, as a Big10 graduate, I am resigned to the fact that my conference is not going to be represented in the National Championship Game for a long time, because Jim Tressel doesn’t know how to prepare his team for a bowl game.

So instead, the BCS needs to be improved.

For starters, I have a suggestion for how to penalize a conference that underperforms during the season. If a BCS conference, as a whole, has a below-.500 record against a non-BCS conference against whom it has played at least five games, it should lose its automatic bid to that conference.

How would this work? Well, this year, for instance, the Pac-10 went 1-6 against the Mountain West, so the Mountain West would get the PAC-10’s birth. This probably wouldn’t have changed anything this year. Utah would have gotten the PAC-10’s automatic berth that went to USC and USC would have gotten the at-large berth that went to Utah. But what if the sub-mediocre Oregon State team hadn’t choked near the end and had somehow won the PAC-10? This rule would have kept the embarrassment that would have occurred from having the Beavers stink up a BCS game.

The rule wouldn’t keep good teams out of bowl games. USC is a good team. They would have received a bid. Instead, it would keep mediocre teams from conference that had a down year from dragging down the BCS. I mean seriously, who wants to watch Cincinnati and Virginia Tech in the Orange Bowl on New Year’s night?

The strongest argument against this rule change, of course, is that BCS bowl teams will be afraid to play the good non-BCS teams like TCU, Utah, and Boise State. But who else would they play? If a good team decides not to play the strong non-BCS teams and loads up on cupcakes, it would hurt their strength of schedule. In addition, the strong BCS teams would need to schedule the better non-BCS teams just to keep them from feeding off of the low BCS teams. The more games Utah is able to play against bottom-of-the-barrel teams like Washington, Duke, and Michigan (wow, it felt great to type that), the better chance the BCS conference has of losing its BCS bid. It would then create an incentive for the better BCS schools to schedule better non-conference teams.

Maybe it’s not perfect, but it sure as hell beats what we have now.

On a scale of one to Gus Johnson, I'd give this a Todd Blackledge.