Ugly Ending In Sight

All those times the NCAA has avoided potential problems with its archaic way of setting a national champion in football have apparently added up to one colossal debacle. Enter 2009: The Year Of The Disaster.

At this very moment there are six (six!!!) teams that are still undefeated as we approach the final stretch of the regular season. Last time I checked, in a bowl game only two can play each other at one time.

Look, we've heard the argument for a playoff for years, but it's not an argument anymore. It's simply a statement of logic.

Virtually every other sport has some kind of season-ending tournament to crown a champion and why college football, one of this country's top draws for more than a century, still doesn't is absolutely ridiculous.

We've heard the laughable excuses of the wear and tear of a longer season and the claim the students would miss too much class time if they had to play a few extra games (I guess they haven't heard of shortening the regular season to compensate). Yet somehow, March Madness for college basketball is so long that it lasts into April.

Obviously, the reason for the way things are all revolves around the big bucks that the bowl games pull in, but it's not like a playoff system wouldn't generate any money (See the aforementioned college basketball). I don't have any projected numbers, but something tells me there would be just a little interest generated by a tournament on top of the endless wave of mainly meaningless bowl games.

Alabama and Florida will get their shot to earn their way into the title game when they square off in the SEC Championship, but for the rest of these teams, their fates rely on a bunch of computer nerds. The BCS is a much better system than what was in place before when undefeated teams didn't necessarily play each other due to conference obligations, but it's true acronym should be "Belies Common Sense."

Boise State's epic win over Oklahoma in the 2007 Fiesta Bowl proved teams from non BCS conferences can play with the big boys. Utah's thrashing of Alabama in last year's Sugar Bowl proved they can contend for a national championship.

Utah didn't get its chance to play for a title despite finishing the season as the country's only undefeated team. How many teams will suffer the same injustice this year?