Although college football season just started, people will inevitably be talking about who will be in the BCS Championship Game. It’s only natural to want to speculate about which school has the better looking team early on and which team will keep it up throughout the season.

But for teams that stumble out of the gate, the season tends to not have as much to gain. Sure, it’s possible to reach the ultimate prize of the BCS Championship, but the odds are heavily stacked against them. The bowl system has been scrutinized for a long time and there is still no indication of a change in the postseason format for NCAA Division I college football.

As an avid college basketball fan, I feel like March Madness is the best time of the year. There’s always uncertainty about who will win, which contender will get upset, the chances for a Cinderella and which of your friends’ brackets will end up being the most accurate.

The BCS doesn’t quite give off the same feeling. Granted, it has the best teams in the nation playing each other, according to the computers. Some would say this proves who the “true” champion would be, while in college basketball a team could get on a hot streak in March and beat the “true” best team.

But, like college basketball, the BCS sometimes still has a question of whether or not the best team even got a chance to play in the championship. There can be more than two undefeated teams in a given year, with all the top teams losing one game, star players coming back from injury and teams not being tested as much by having an extremely weak schedule. With these factors still at play, there is still doubt about whether the BCS truly rewards the best team in college football anyways.

However, BCS supporters raise concerns with going to a playoff format as well. With a playoff, the student athletes will miss even more classes. The players miss a lot of class as it is, and this would pull them out even more.

Then there is the attendance issue: With the current bowl system, fans will know of their team’s opponent and venue at least two weeks in advance.

If a playoff system were implemented, there wouldn’t be any way to tell how long your team would be in the playoffs. There would only be a week’s notice for fans to make plans, book hotels and purchase tickets. As far as helping the fans in this regard, it puts a little more pressure on the fans to get everything set to support their team in the postseason.

The debate will become more and more heated as the season goes on. Teams will feel like they’ve gotten cheated out of an opportunity to be crowned champion, while others will feel like they got exactly what they deserved with the BCS.

While the decision may seem easy to many fans, it obviously doesn’t come across that way to many BCS commissioners. There is no perfect system to make everyone happy and no right or wrong answer to this debate.

But, when all is said and done, the bowl season doesn’t quite generate the same excitement for me as March Madness does every year.