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Wetzel's Playoff Plan Could Be a Winner

احدث اجدد واروع واجمل واشيك Wetzel's Playoff Plan Could Be a Winner

If you care about football, you're going to be watching the No. 1-ranked Auburn Tigers play the No. 2-ranked Oregon Ducks for the national championship Monday. It should be a great match-up: The Tigers are led by quarterback Cam Newton, the overwhelming winner of this year's Heisman Trophy, while the Ducks are paced by star running back LaMichael James. If the game doesn't produce at least 80 points, some ticket holders may ask for their money back.

Not to temper your enjoyment, but while you're watching, consider what might have been. Fans could have gorged on as many as 14 more games just as good as Auburn and Oregon, and all of them more significant than the plethora of postseason bowls—if college football had a playoff system.

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Auburn Tigers' Cam Newton on a rush during a game against the South Carolina Gamecocks in December.

Mr. Newton, the most electrifying player in college football this decade, could have displayed his prodigious talents in as many as four more postseason games. Last year's Heisman winner, Alabama's Mark Ingram, could have been scoring touchdowns in a meaningful playoff match instead of just another bowl game when No. 16 Alabama crushed No. 9 Michigan State 49-7 on New Year's Day in the Capital One Bowl.

We could have had any number of scenarios that promised a bigger and more exciting college-football postseason than we got. Instead, we have what Bob Boyles, co-author of the USA Today College Football Encyclopedia, calls "Snow White" (that's the Bowl Championship Series title game) "and six or seven dwarves" (all the other big bowls).

Why, exactly? Dan Wetzel, co-author (along with Josh Peter and Jeff Passan) of "Death to the BCS: The Definitive Case Against the Bowl Championship Series," has a simple answer—one that finally resolves many of the complaints that opponents of a move to a playoff system, including myself, have frequently voiced over the years.

"There is no one in charge of college football," Mr. Wetzel writes. Not even the National Collegiate Athletic Association? "The NCAA is there to regulate college athletic revenues," he says, "but there's a group of people—many of them in a couple of the conferences with the most economic and political clout—who have a vested interest in maintaining the current system."

What's wrong with the system the way it is? Apparently everything. As Tex Noel of the Intercollegiate Football Researchers Association puts it, "The one thing that all its critics agree on is that the game would be better off without the BCS."

The most frequent complaints about the BCS system are that:

• The traditional regional appeal of the bowl games has been undercut. For instance, the granddaddy of them all, the Rose Bowl, pitted Wisconsin and Texas Christian on New Year's Day, neither from the PAC 10 conference.

• The BCS championship game has usurped interest in the other big games. Fan attention is now centered on No. 1 vs. No. 2, with all other games serving as an irrelevant sideshow.

• The selection process is still in part a "popularity poll." The current Byzantine method of determining the No. 1 and No. 2 teams hasn't eliminated this longstanding criticism.

Few claim to understand the BCS ranking system. It involves two traditional opinion polls—one composed of sportswriters and broadcasters (AP) and the other the Coaches' Poll—as well as an averaging out of six computer ranking methods.

All six computer methods send the BCS a list of their Top 25; the best team receives 25 points while the lowest-ranked team gets one point. The BCS then drops the highest and lowest ranking for each team to eliminate extremes, adds the four remaining numbers, divides them by 100, and averages that number with those from the coaches and writers'/broadcasters' poll. Got that?

One problem with the computer polls is that they're not allowed to consider margin of victory or schedule toughness.

"The BCS people think that figuring in margin of victory will encourage poor sportsmanship, with strong teams piling up the score on weaker teams. This is absurd, as it imposes a moral judgment on an objective ranking system," Mr. Wetzel says. In any event, as most BCS detractors take note, not considering schedule toughness encourages strong teams to schedule patsies, which produces blowouts anyway. Simply put, if you're not going to consider margin of victory and schedule, why are computers needed at all?

It would be a simple matter, Mr. Wetzel argues, to allow the best computer algorithms to choose the top schools and have a 16-team, 15-game playoff. Such a plan could generate, Mr. Wetzel estimates, as much as $750 million in revenue for Division 1-A schools.

It would also mean that the burden of determining the national championship would not be put on polls of any kind: The issue would be settled on the field. And in response to another common complaint, most of the playoff rounds would be played on college campuses instead of neutral sites. As Mr. Wetzel explains, "the top-seeded teams would play the first few rounds on their campuses—except for the final, which would be at a neutral site."

Such a plan would benefit fans, colleges and television networks. The only thing standing in its way is a handful of influential college conference officials and bowl executives who profit from the current system and don't want to see it change.

"College football should have a real Super Bowl instead of a game that raises more issues than it settles," Mr. Wetzel says. "We're preaching excellence but accepting mediocrity."

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