FanNation - The Republic of Sport

As Jim Tressel and Les Miles prepare Buckeyes and Tigers for their showdown for the crystal pigskin on the seventh of January, the nation debates whether the BCS has yielded the right choice for the national championship game. Fans from Athens to Honolulu wonder why a one-loss team with an unremarkable strength of schedule and a two-loss media favorite should get to play for the title in this most absurd of seasons. Pundits come out of the woodwork for their annual playoff lobbying. Their opponents counter-punch with cries of tradition and the pomp and circumstance of the bowl system.

A playoff system would crown a true national champion.

Eliminating the bowl system would strip the American sports landscape of a grand piece of history.

And it goes on and on...

But tradition dictates that only truly dominant teams should be playing in the postseason. And it is crucial to remember that second-placed teams used to sit at home on New Year's Day. When Michigan used to square off seemingly every year against Ohio State with the Big Ten title and a berth in the Rose Bowl on the line, Woody Hayes and Bo Schembechler knew that they were playing for more than just national recognition. As Schembechler said at the 2006 funeral of his 1971 quarterback, Tom Slade, the goal was not beating Ohio State or national championships or anything else other than becoming a good man and a proud representative of Michigan. Coaches certainly considered victories important, but they did not let victory step in the way of their first task: molding teenagers and twenty-somethings into consummate and productive members of society.

Tradition saw conferences square off in a battle to determine which was better in a given season. The best team from the Pac-10 and the Big Ten would square off every year in the Rose Bowl. And what is wrong with that? Winning the Rose Bowl used to give a team cachet and swagger heading into the next season; now, a team is only as good as its most recent victory, and it is as terrible as its most recent defeat. Now a coach is safe if he can achieve mediocrity -- the Papajohns.com, Meineke Car Care, New Mexico, Humanitarian and all the other minor upstart bowls have made sure of that. Fully one quarter of Division I-A football will end the season with a trophy-clenching victory. A 6-6 team runs the risk of reaching the postseason and ending with a losing record. No longer must Michigan sit at home on New Year's day, waiting for next season, simply because they lost the Big Ten title to Ohio State... the Capital One Bowl has made sure of that!

Tradition flew out the window when money became more important than character at these football factories masquerading as academies of higher education. The BCS is the closest thing to a Statistics class that most of these athletes are ever going to witness in college. With academic graduation rates plummeting even as players redshirt their way into five years of football eligibility, there no longer is a place for coaches who care more about their players' success as human beings more than success as gridiron gods. And the bowls do little to assuage the fears of the general public that they are only in it for the Benjamins.

As soon as the Rose Bowl lost its traditional matchup and changed its moniker to "The Rose Bowl Game Presented by Citi", it lost a lot of the respect it had for itself and the respect it garnered amond the rest of fandom. Likewise for the Allstate (nee: Nokia) Sugar Bowl, the FedEx Orange Bowl, etc. etc....

We may not have the matchup we desired, but we sure got what we deserved when we clamored for a better system. Tradition dictated that it wasn't the one crown that mattered, but the accumulated lifespan of those who graced the game. The BCS does exactly what it is designed to do: maximize revenues for football factories and for the bowls who host them. It even satisfies that most-recent latent desire among American sports fans to have "one true champ" in every college sport. It may not do so perfectly, but it gives the sports world an illusion of champion.

But as far as tradition, that went out the field long before the BCS or Bowl Alliance came kicking around for traction. These institutions were manifested to capitalize on an already-dominant desire to generate big bucks...