[NU Sports] bowls and BCS

[Brad Wilson]

Look, it's very simple. 

Pro football has playoffs. I-A College football does
not.

Almost all of the columnists, media types and
blowhards ranting about the BCS and bowls are, really,
pro football types who are not really college football
fans in except in a very general I-read-the-scores
kind of way (as I am with pro football). 

These people's agenda is to make college football more
like pro football. I like college FB because it ISN'T
like pro football in so many ways. 

As a sports journalist and longtime CFB fan, I find
that the people I know who are real CFB fans don't
especially want a playoff while the more casual sports
fans want, even demand, a playoff so CFB can be more
like the sport the casual fans know better, pro
football.

To my mind, the BCS did its job: it picked two teams
to play in a "national title" game. In any one-game
situation, there may be deserving teams left out, as
perhaps happened this year (but, hey, no one made
Auburn schedule The Citadel). But that's a whole other
issue; the BCS was set up to identify two top teams
and it did, and it's hard to argue that either team
was not deserving (as it has been in past years).

As for Cal, well, I am with Paul Levinson on disliking
Texas and Mack "Whiner" Brown intensely, but before
falling over Cal as a great academic school go check
its dOSU-like graduation rates. Maybe they deserved to
go the Rose Bowl, maybe not (Texas' record was in some
ways more impressive), but as members of a BCS league
they agreed to play by the system and sometimes life
isn't fair (ask the Illini or Iowa fans who missed
Pasadena for other BCS destinations).

I can live with the BCS, but I'd rather just go back
to the old system including Big Ten-PAC-10 EVERY YEAR
in Pasadena. If there's split national titles, who
cares? Two groups of kids, coaches and fans get to
bask in some glory -- great for them. If the pollsters
don't always make the right choices -- though they
almost always did, with exceptions such as 1994 --
well, mistakes happen in life, learn to deal with
them. 

If sports are supposed to help prepare kids for real
life, then learning to live with frustration,
disappointment and errors in judgment, which are rife
in the real world, is part of that preparation. Life's
not always a bowl (pardon the pun) of cherries, roses,
or anything else.

Brad Wilson

 








 

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"Life is more delectable/When it's disrespectable." -- Lorenz Hart 

"Quis ipsos custodes custodiet?" -- Juvenal

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