With the college bowl games still fresh in our memories, and the NFL season coming to its conclusion, some sportswriters and pundits and radio talkers are still beating the drums for a college playoff. One might have thought that the topic was exhausted many weeks ago; or, failing that, one might have thought that witnessing the BCS working to perfection again this year—matching up the one undefeated BCS-conference team with its single strongest possible opponent—might have dampened the enthusiasm of playoff advocates. But some of them are so certain that a playoff system solves everything and proves everything that they soldier on regardless.

It is odd, how playoff advocates talk of “settling it on the field” to produce a “true champion”. Does college football not already settle things on the field, every week? Were Florida this year, Texas last year, USC the year before, not “true champions”? It is curious how some people are such prisoners of the basketball mentality—the mentality that gives us the come-one-come-all NCAA Tournament and NBA Playoffs—that they instinctively discount the regular season, even in a sport which has no post-season save for a constellation of holiday bowl games. They indeed seem offended that we even try to identify the best college football team in the country, based solely on regular-season performance. Their faith tells them that, in any sport, one can only crown a true champion by drawing up brackets, and then awarding the title to whoever manages to be better, or hotter, or cleverer, or luckier, two or three or four times in a row.

But that is not what college football is about. From the earliest days of the sport, it has instead been about which team is the best in the land all season long, from start to finish; and in Division I-A it continues to be so. Ever since Major League Baseball adopted divisional play, it has thus stood as the closest thing we have to pure league play in major American sports. In our day, it serves as a desperately-needed sign of contradiction, as the one bright shining monument standing against the self-evident validity falsely attributed to playoff systems.

And that self-evident validity, that metaphysical certainty that whichever team emerges from the brackets will be the true champion, is false. Forget March Madness, forget the NBA Playoffs, forget the quest for the Stanley Cup: the BCS actually does the best job of any major American sport of selecting the right two teams for the final contest.

It is so fashionable to bash the BCS, and the details of the BCS process itself so closely resemble sausage-making, that this may seem unlikely, may sound fanciful or outlandish. But consider the results. How often does the best team in America play in the BCS title game? Every year so far. How often is that team’s opponent either the second- or third-best team in the land? Every year so far. Can the NFL make the same claim for their last VIII or IX Super Bowls? No…even though the NFL has only half as many teams to choose from as the BCS. Can any other sport claim a comparable record? No. And Major League Baseball deserves special, detailed consideration here, to highlight its current wretchedness compared to the glory that is college football.

Why have fogies (old and young) like myself always scorned the “wild card” in baseball? Because they play 162 games a season, for crying out loud. If that doesn’t prove “on the field” who the best teams are, what possibly could? Yet baseball has decided that a team that won fewer games—out of, again, one hundred sixty-two—than its rival who faced the exact same schedule and won its division, may be admitted to the playoffs nonetheless; and if they have two hot starting pitchers who can carry them to eleven wins out of nineteen postseason games, they will be crowned champions of Major League Baseball, the greatest team in the land. Even though they were not necessarily the best team in their division…over a one hundred and sixty-two game schedule.

That is insanity, beside which even the unloveliest aspects of the BCS ranking system appear as exemplars of logic, right reason, and truth. It is the sort of insanity that spoils the regular season in every other sport, and would in college football too. How could it not? How could anyone devise a playoff system that would, for instance, have made UCLA’s upset of USC this past season still matter? Even in a scanty four-team playoff, USC would have had better-than-even odds of making it in—especially since, in a playoff world, Pete Carroll would not have been going for broke, would have been resting some of his starters for the next round, and the poll voters would have taken account of that. Eight teams or more in the playoff, and the Trojans laugh off the defeat. And that would be a travesty.

Nor is it right that, in the current BCS system, a team can be defeated for its conference title but still turn up in the national championship game. For a team that was second-best in its conference to be declared national champion would be nonsense, pure and simple, and the only possible way to for it make sense would be via the radical devaluation of regular season play that results from the basketball mentality. We have, thus far, been fortunate that such undeserving interlopers have gone down to ignominious defeat in the championship game; but the system needs to be changed to require a conference championship for admittance to the title game in future.

I’m sure that’s more than enough from me on this subject, so I will leave the last word to the legendary Larry Munson, who said the following in his daily radio commentary right after Florida clobbered Ohio State in the BCS title game:

…the trouble-makers–and that includes a hundred people or so–need to shut our mouth and let college football alone. It is so close to perfection it is mind-boggling.

Amen.