Penny Thoughts: March Madness highlights the failures in FBS football
It is March once again. I argue that March is the greatest month for sports fans, and that is because the greatest sports spectacle in the world takes place every March: The NCAA Basketball Tournament, more colloquially known as “March Madness.”
Most fans of football are fans of basketball, and thus an overlap takes place in which a large community of fans get to watch a collective 63+ basketball games to determine a champion. To add more interest, fans are competing with each other to beat the absurd 1 in 9.2 quintillion odds to be the first person to complete the first verified perfect bracket prediction.
March truly is the best month for sports fans.
However, it also highlights the discrepancy in effectiveness determining a champion between the highest level of college basketball and the highest level of college football. Wherein 68 teams get to play for a national title in basketball, only four get to play in Division I FBS Football, and it took years for it to finally even reach four.
NCAA Division I FBS football is an outlier in the NCAA; because of the fact the sport predates the NCAA and is the reason the NCAA exists, the NCAA doesn’t get to bestow a national title on the sport like it does for all the others. Instead, for the longest time, deciding a national champion was up to the worst group of people able to do so: sportswriters. It is the only sport like this.
As such, many of the national titles in the 20th century are split between two or more teams. It’s such a mess that, by default, any claim of a national title is legitimate. As much as you don’t believe it, UCF’s national title claim is 100% recognized by the NCAA.
In order to fix this, the Bowl Coalition was made- with this system in place, split championships would be no more. However, the tie-ins failed to capture the Big 10 and Pac-10, causing a myriad of problems that were highlighted by a 6-4-1 Notre Dame team playing in what today is an equivalent of a New Year’s Six Bowl.
So they replaced it with the Bowl Alliance, truly the best way to decide a national champion, which also couldn’t secure the bowl tie-ins of the Big Ten and Pac-10, leading to a split national title between Nebraska and Michigan in 1997.
So another solution: the Bowl Championship Series, or the BCS. The BCS would use computer ranking to definitively select the two best teams in the nation. This time, the Big Ten and Pac-10 agreed to join, and finally college football had its perfect system.
Just kidding. In 2000, Miami was screwed out of a spot in the national title game. In 2001, Nebraska, who was ranked number 4 in both the AP and Coaches’ Poll, was inexplicably selected to get their heads caved in by Miami. And in 2003, after a 35-7 loss in the Big 12 Championship to Kansas State, Oklahoma fell from the number 1 team in the nation to… still the number one team in the nation. LSU and USC split the national title for 2003 because of this.
Even after these debacles, it took another 11 years after the 2003 season to finally come up with the objectively best way to determine a national champion: a playoff. Every other level of football uses a playoff system of more than 16 teams.
This was exciting news for college football fans. Finally, a system that would highlight the best of college football, and would give us more football games. So, how many teams would be in this tournament?
Four. The bare minimum for a playoff system with no byes, one-sixth of the FCS playoff system, and one-sixteenth of the famed March Madness.
For years now, college football fans have asked for expansion, but as the years have gone by, more have actually resisted that, claiming that the lack of parity in Division I FBS football is too much for an eight-team, or even a 16-team playoff. If more teams get in, they’ll just get blown out, and that games are more competitive in the four team system. This is baloney.
The average margin of victory in playoff games since its exception in 2014 is 19 points, as is, teams get blown out in the playoffs.
Another argument is that if the playoff is expanded, mid-major conferences would get a bid, leading to more blowouts. Due to the blatant disrespect mid-major teams get in college football, the main idea is that the same mid-major teams would just get dunked on.
Speaking of dunked on, might I add that, even in this COVID-19 filled college basketball season which saw mid-major teams play horrible non-conference schedules because of the pandemic, 15-seed Oral Roberts, 14-seed Abilene Christian, 13-seed North Texas and 13-seed Ohio beat college basketball blue-bloods Ohio State, Texas, Purdue and Virginia respectively. The large field in college basketball allows mid-major teams to thrive.
I believe the same would happen if the FBS were to expand the playoff. College football would be better.
And, as much as I hate to say it, the NCAA needs to step in. Their system of picking teams for a playoff is much better, and the credibility sportswriters have should be stripped. I don’t want them determining who wins national titles.
Who wouldn’t love a 24-team FBS playoff? Probably the people behind the bowls, but overall, college football would benefit in both parity and quality of play if the playoffs were to expand.