It’s New Year’s Day. You wake up early considering what took place the night before. You set up shop on the living room couch. At 10 a.m., all of the college football games kickoff. And you proceed to kick back because, for this one day of awesomeness, your world revolves around bowl games.
It’s one of the best feelings ever, having all of those TVs in one room (your dad moves all of the TVs into the living room for college football, too. That’s normal, right?) and then soaking in all that glory of college football all day long and into the night. This has been my ritual every January 1 since I’ve been born. And I hope to keep it that way even if the college game at long last moves to a playoff to decide its champion.
Yes, it’s April. But we are opening this can of worms anyway.
On Wednesday, the wretched Bowl Championship Series committee announced, among other things, the name and location of the championship accompanying its new system that turns the major bowl games into semifinal playoff games. In its inaugural season in 2014, the title game will be played in the Death Star stadium in Dallas, with the Rose and Sugar Bowls acting as semifinals.
Yes, we finally have some sort of a playoff in college football. It only took a hundred-plus years and a handful of controversial finishes to football seasons. It’s been a long-awaited change. Fans of the game can rest a little easier knowing they have some of the championship matchup decided on the field instead of by computers.
But in my opinion, I don’t think it should go much further than this.
I’ve made this argument for as long as the debate has been around, and I’m not backing down from it. The bowls are good for college football. They’re a tradition that I don’t want to see being messed with or worse yet, done away with entirely.
Not only are bowl games something unique to the sport and rooted deep in its history, but they are also what make its regular season so exciting. At its current status, every game counts. If you want to win a championship, you have to win your scheduled games. The same cannot be said for any other sport, especially its professional counterpart, where a team that has a losing record with three games left can still win the Super Bowl, like the New York Giants did two years ago.
That is why it would be smart for the NCAA and BCS to stick with the new system. The significance of each and every game is what makes college football so exhilarating. If we switched to a full-out playoff, like a bracket-style, 20-team playoff or something, who cares if Michigan loses to Virginia Commonwealth at the beginning of the year? In the long run, it wouldn’t matter because they only have to make it to a playoff to get the shot at winning it all. These games are what make my Saturdays. I don’t want that excitement or importance to be taken out of them.
I love my bowl games. College football would be smart to keep them. The fans would be smart to be content with this new system. Sure, it’s a little unorthodox and slightly confusing. But that’s nothing new. These are adjectives that have always been a staple when defining college football.
Hopefully, this will be the lay of the land for a while. It’s still better than the alternatives that I’ve seen. And in the end, I’ll get to keep my New Year’s Day tradition alive. Can’t wait to get those TVs hooked up.