The Case For Boise State

The college football world is atwitter about the remaining possibilities for the fraudulent national championship that will pit Ohio State against someone on January 8 in Glendale, Arizona. Southern Cal is in the driver's seat now, and if they defeat crosstown rivals UCLA next week they will go to another BCS championship game. Waiting in the wings are Michigan, who gave Ohio State one hell of a game last weekend, and Florida, which, if it beats Arkansas in the SEC championship game will be able to point out that not only did it lose only one game in the brutal Southeastern Conference, but it also took on a playoff game to win the conference, something neither the Big ten nor the Pac ten expects of their top teams.

But I am here to lobby for Boise State. Undefeated Boise State. Michigan, USC, Florida -- these teams all have something that Boise State does not have: A loss pocking their record.

Do I think Boise State is as talented as these other teams? No. Do I think that they would beat any of those teams in a bowl game? No. But that really should not matter. Every year the experts -- sportswriters, talking heads, and ex-jocks-turned analysts -- pronounce at the end of the year that for all of its flaws, the BCS has ended up working. This is a bizarre proposition on the part of a bunch of people who, not to put too fine a point on it, are wrong all the time. Why do the college football rankings change every week? Because on the field college football teams give the lie to the experts who decide where teams should be ranked. Unlike in major college basketball, where these things are decided on the court, the rankings in college football are vital. The self-importance of sportswriters (and coaches who just might have an agenda, not to mention an interest in these matters) actually helps determine the national picture in college football. People who are wrong on a weekly basis in very public forums get to decide which teams are better than others in lieu of those teams actually playing on the field.

Division I-A college football is the only sport at any division that does not legitimately decide its champion on the field. Who can say with any certainty whether USC would beat Michigan, or Michigan would beat Florida, or Florida would beat Wisconsin (or that Wisconsin would beat Ohio)? Why is it that even as I type, the playoff brackets in Divisions I-AA, II, and III are all becoming more clear? There is no rational justification for any of this, just as there is no rational justification for the fact that the Alamo Bowl recently announced that in a choice between Minnesota and Iowa they would take the Iowa team with a substantially worse record than Minnesota and that lost to the Gophers 34-24 in their season finale.

Which brings us back to Boise State. In what other area of the NCAA sporting firmament can a team go undefeated and yet be told that they have no shot at the national championship from the outset? How is it that Division I football can maintain a de facto two-tiered structure? If The MAC and WAC and Mountain West can never produce a team capable of competing for the sport's national championship, shouldn't the NCAA tell them that they have to play at the I-AA level? If the BCS conference teams are the only ones guaranteed a shot, shouldn't they secede and form a Super-Division I?

Boise State's detractors will point to the conference schedule that Boise State plays, and rightly will argue that it does not even begin to compare with the Pac Ten. But Boise State plays in the conference it plays in. If Division I-A football has two-tiers, shouldn't a team such as Boise State be able to demand admission to one of those conferences? If that very conference structure is going to be used to deny Boise State an opportunity to build on an undefeated season, Boise State ought to be able to say "we want into the Pac Ten." Otherwise, the NCAA is clearly priviledging one group of schools at the expense of the others despite demanding certain conditions for those same teams to maintain their Division I-A status.

By not having a playoff system the NCAA effectively supports a system that manipulates who can and cannot play for the national chanmpionship game and who can and cannot share in the BCS pie and the riches that fill it. Were I a Senator from Idaho, or Florida, or Michigan, I would wonder why the NCAA gets to establish such a capricious system that favors some schools, and thus some states, over others without some sort of oversight and with the billions of dollars at stake. This patent lack of fairness would provide a pretty sound foundation for a holistic challenge to the NCAA's tax exampt status as well as to serious probing about what it means to be a student athlete at state universities.

Since the solons who control NCAA football do not care about legitimately deciding the championship on the field, I will continue to preach the virtues of Boise State, the people's national champion. A team that has done what Michigan, Florida, and USC could not do. A team that deserves a piece of Ohio State until we have a playoff system that gives every conference at least one berth in a tournament that decides the national championship where every other NCAA football division manages to establish these things -- on the field. Go Broncos!