The Frinklin and Fred Show

Where I become a very cranky old football fan

Is it okay to come out now? We have Ohio State and Florida in the championship game. Or, excuse me the “Tostitos BCS Championship Game”. That surely rolls off the tongue.

Anyway, are we done caterwauling over the BCS and lack of a playoff or and “And One” game? I really hate this time of year, starting about three weeks before the end of the season and ending about a week before the bowls actually start. We get endless whining about how college football is the only sport in the known universe that doesn’t decide it’s champion on the field and how the computers make all the decisions and…

Just shut up.

I hate the BCS.

I would hate a playoff even more.

I don’t particularly care about the national championship. I know this makes me part of a very small minority of football fans. I really miss the old days, before the BCS bastardization of the bowl games. I may sound like a cranky old man (I did turn 33 this weekend), but the bowls were so much more simple and elegant then. The Big 10 and Pac-10 champs played in the Rose Bowl. The SEC champ went to the Sugar, the Big 8 champ the Orange, and the SWC champion the Cotton Bowl. The Cotton Bowl started New Year’s Day, and the Orange and Sugar ended it. Only the Big Kids were allowed on the first, and nothing came after.

This was too damned easy apparently. Now we have this bizarre situation that finds the last bowl game a week after New Years and such measly bowls as the International and GMAC played the first week in January. And nobody’s happy. The playoff cretins are screaming about how we absolutely must-must-must have a clear-cut champion, and poor lonely souls like me are wondering just what the hell the Capital One Bowl used to be.

My hatred of any possible playoff system is personal. I went to Washington State. In 1997, Ryan Leaf and Mike Price miraculously pushed the Cougs into the Rose Bowl for the first time in 67 years. I watched the Apple Cup with my father. He, the longtime Husky rooting for the UW and me for WSU. When the Cougars finally closed out the Huskies after a 41-35 thriller, there were tears in my eyes. We were going to the promised land, the Granddaddy of them all, the only bowl that ever really matters. There was an explosion of joy amongst Cougar fans that I had never seen before and almost certainly will never see again. After two generations of futility, after watching the hated Huskies head to Pasadena 11 times since WSU did, we had finally won.

Had there been a playoff, the Cougars would have been the 8 seed in an eight team playoff. And who gives a shit about that?

Kill the BCS. Forget the playoff. Bring back the old days.

Posted by Frinklin at December 3, 2006 10:34 PM | TrackBack