BCS
It's a few hours until the BCS game, one that I'm not going to watch because, quite frankly, I don't care about college football. Anyone who has ever been to a big college knows they're getting paid and pampered. And that the bowl system is only based on antiquated notions of amaturism and nobility. The traditions ceased as soon as the BCS was born. And the attempt to pander bowl games to us as a sort of traditional wonder only plays to notions of the public's idiocy.
If college football is just a cherished, honored, faux-tradition laced mascarade (and it is), I'll stick to the real thing -- the NFL -- where the professionals are the best in the world and the champion is determined the way they are determined in all real sports -- a tournament.
If the fake romanticism hadn't turned me off to college completely -- it still hasn't sapped my love of professional sports, after all -- the way the sport's biggest week has turned meaningless, has. Every other major sport has playoffs. Even in tennis and golf, there is a crescendo until the final day of a tournament. Anticipation builds as time passes. Likewise in college football we go through the regular season, with anticipation building as the two top teams slowly unveil themselves. Even under the old bowl system, New Year's Day was awash with anticipation as it often took two or three games before a national champion became clear.
Now we sit and watch 20 meaningless bowl games, games which we pretend people care about because of long-lost romanticism, but which actually have no national appeal whatsoever and matter only to fans of the two schools playing. Finally, once any and all momentum and excitment is killed off from the completed season, we play the national championship.
I won't be watching tonight. But I will be rooting. I'll be rooting for the Gators to completely demolish the Buckeyes, as well as the BCS system as it's currently designed. If nothing else, college football needs an "And-1 game,' an extra game after the top four teams play. A playoff isn't going to happen -- although my ideal scenario is an eight-team playoff, one that would have gotten Boise State into the event this year (college presidents and officials need to come down off their high-horse about athletes being students. They could care less about academics, and so could 95 percent of the athletes). Too many people have too much money at stake for the bowls to be eliminated. But the only way for the harness of the BCS to be lifted is for the public to receive a completely unsatisfactory ending and complain so much that the NCAA has no choice but to amend its ways. That, at least, brings us back to a point where there is a build-up to the final game.
Anyway, let's get tonight over with so we can get our focus back to what really matters -- college basketball and the NFL, sports that end like they should -- with the best two teams emerging from their toughest tests of the season (not from a holiday layoff and a judging contest more like a dog show than an athletic event) to meet in a final battle of wills.