Sports Opinion: BCS needs to change postseason policies

Jeff Daniels/Staff Writer

The BCS is a fraudulent system. Always has been. Always will be. Only now are people recognizing this for the first time as many teams are vying to be the second-best team behind LSU.

Alabama, Virginia Tech, Oklahoma State and others are sending their best pitches in, pointing out their own strengths and at the weaknesses of the other opponents. These arguments will only fire up in the upcoming weeks when the final dash to the National Championship begins. Ignore what the talking heads want you to believe: the BCS is not designed to choose the perfect championship matchup.

It is used mainly to avoid the impending doom that is a playoff, which the bowl directors fear will cut into their millions of tax-free profits. Remember the issue with the CEO of the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl? A report came out that the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl paid for a golf date with Jack Nicklaus. If you don’t know who that is, I’ll just say this: Right now, he’s regarded by many as the greatest golfer of all time.

If for some godforsaken reason a playoff system doesn’t form in the near future, then the system used to pick the No. 1 and 2 teams in the country needs a thorough revising.
Right now, two-thirds of the selection process is human opinion polls, which are full of political issues and where conformity in a large group is the norm. The last third of the selection process is made up of six separate computer system formulas that have been criticized for actually not being as accurate as they could be. Not only that, but five of the six computer system formulas are unknown, even to the BCS.If the group in charge of picking the National Championship game doesn’t know how part of the selection process is made up, how the heck can we be sure that the formulas are actually fair and accurate?

The one formula that has been made public got in trouble last year because the person that created the computer formula entered scores that weren’t up to date. Jerry Palm, a reporter from CollegeBCS.com, made the discovery when double-checking this person’s rankings. It turned out that one insignificant game between two FCS teams determined the final ranking of four teams in the top 20, which included LSU and Boise State. The people running the BCS seem to put all their faith into the creators of the computer formulas, which Palm states might not be the most intelligent thing to do: “This is my longstanding gripe with the system. No one is held accountable.” You’re right, Palm. No one is held accountable. So when you see the final BCS standings in the coming weeks, the results might be correct. Or they might be wrong. You’ll never know.