Wishing for Ghosts of New Years' Past

I'm thinking I need to replace those college fight song ring tones on my cell. Instead of "The Victors" or "Boomer Sooner," there ought to be a Gregorian-style chant that says, "Junk the BCS for the Rotting Goat Carcass That It Is."

On Dec. 20, the bowl season will begin with the San Diego County Credit Union Poinsettia Bowl and will steadily build from there with trashy ad-sloganeering momentum to the Allstate BCS Championship on Jan. 7, which by all rights ought to be renamed the Purely Accidental Bowl, given the random selection of Ohio State and Louisiana State as the participants. As I watch, I'll be reminded of what I really want for Christmas: the past. I want to return to a time when college football wasn't for sale.

Of course, those days aren't coming back. So maybe the thing to wish for is the future -- one with a playoff system that actually settles things on the field, instead of purporting to.

It's the purported-ness of the Bowl Championship Series that is so offensive, the notion that it legitimizes something so plainly illegitimate, a contrivance that's designed to concentrate the largest bowl payouts in the hands of the major conferences and please advertisers. The audience and competitors? It's a one-over on them, never more so than this season.

The old bowl system had its flaws, but it was infinitely more satisfying than this fraudulent series of billboards. Once, New Year's Day was a cavalcade in which every game mattered. They were called things such as the Sugar, Orange, Cotton and Rose; they had regional flavor as well as potential title implications; and the team colors seemed like different flags. When it was all over, you often had a pretty clear idea who the best team was, and if you didn't, well, that was part of the intrigue. It was unique. There was nothing else like it in sport, which was what made it so satisfying -- even when it was dissatisfying. The old system never purported to settle anything; it merely claimed to be a matchless good time.

There now are 32 bowls, meaning 64 teams will play in some sort of postseason contest, including 6-5 Memphis against 7-5 Florida Atlantic in the R&L Carriers New Orleans Bowl. That's right, more than half of the 119 teams in the top football echelon will be in action, which should tell you that the focus is hardly on determining a champion. Rather, it's on customers and clients such as Tostitos crunchy chips ("Share Something Good!"), Meineke Car Care ("You Won't Pay A Lot"), and PapaJohns.com ("Better Ingredients. Better Pizza"). Amid all of this junk, the BCS would have us think one game matters, the stand-alone, staged championship extravaganza that won't be played until Jan. 7 -- a full 51 days after Ohio State played its last regular season game -- so as to maximize the ad buys.

In truth, nothing will be settled but some expense-account tabs. Meantime, the argument will rage on about why the NCAA won't simply adopt a straightforward playoff.

The BCS defenders have the nerve to claim their system is preferable to a playoff because it preserves the "tradition" of the bowls. But the BCS is to bowl tradition what Naugahyde is to fabric. It's vinyl. If the old-schoolers really want to hang on to yesteryear, then do it. Go back and restore the old system. Kill the BCS and reestablish the prestige of the Orange, Sugar, Cotton, Rose, and Fiesta. Let bowl reps in blazers choose the schools they will play host to, making their selections with a combination of polls, politicking and common sense from among those teams with the most compelling arguments as the best in the country.

But they won't do it, because the BCS always was predicated on an attempt by a handful of power conferences to preserve their majority share of profits. But this season, with its sheer proliferation of good teams, has truly exposed it as a scam. The days when a Tom Osborne won 10 games every year at Nebraska are gone. These days, Michigan is having trouble hiring a head coach; that alone should tell you where college football stands. The message to the old-guard power brokers is that their schools aren't markedly more successful or desirable than the upstarts any more. There are too many good coaches, and plenty of players who don't want to sit on the bench for three years. They'd rather go play now at South Florida.

How can you argue with a season in which Appalachian State beat Michigan, Southern California lost to Stanford, Kentucky clipped LSU in triple overtime, Navy topped Notre Dame in triple overtime, Tennessee cost Georgia a title shot and Pittsburgh upended West Virginia in the Backyard Brawl? And those are just the boldest highlights. Ten times, the top two teams in the country were upset. Three times, the Nos. 1 and 2 teams lost in the same week.

Can you imagine how much fun an eight-team playoff would be this season? Or any season?

The NCAA should scrap the BCS and make a decision. Either roll back to the old bowl system or adopt a playoff. There are tons of good proposals out there, including some that actually incorporate the bowls. A particularly good one comes from Michael MacCambridge, author of ESPN's "College Football Encyclopedia." His proposal: Eight teams placed into four New Year's Day games. Six conference champions get automatic berths, with two at-large bids among worthy runners-up and/or other conference champions, as determined by a selection committee similar to the NCAA basketball tournament. The four winners go to a final four at the site of a fifth bowl, which hosts both semifinal games on successive nights, and the national championship game a week later.

The final four site is rotated among the five bowls, with all hosting the New Year's Day quarterfinal games. All the other bowls are pushed back into late December -- where they belong.

Every now and then, MacCambridge runs his proposal past some of the old-guard athletic directors who built the BCS. He doesn't get much of anywhere. Their response? "It's like fighting old money in a small town," he says.