Congress has finally set its sights on changing the Bowl Championship Series — or at least it will investigate as to why a playoff system is such a terrible idea. This debate is nothing new, but its never been brought up in the middle of Spring when most people have forgotten college football for post-season basketball, hockey, and baseball.

BCS (and ACC) coordinator John Swofford actually kept a straight face when telling congressional members today that “a playoff would threaten the existence of celebrated bowl games.” Yes, all those celebrated storied bowl games we have come to respect so much…
 

Swofford continued to spew hot trash from his mouth by saying “it will be very difficult for any bowl, including the current BCS bowls, to survive.” I am pretty sure that given the success of every other playoff system in sports, a college football playoff would be like filling up every stadium in the country to the very brim with $100 bills and then squeezing the poop out out of every male consumer aged 9-99 and stirring it around to make a moon-sized cotton candy ball of filthy rich shit. The shitty bowls that don’t get to be among the 7 tournament games can just fight it out over the scraps of money until we have a good number of bowl games determined by demand, not sponsorship dollars.

On the other hand, Rep. Joe Barton of Texas was equally out of his mind calling the BCS system “communism.” Granted I don’t particularly agree with the BCS system in its current form but I would never liken it to a Czechoslovak coup d’état. Barton was referring to the system as one that locks out the smaller conferences and focuses instead on rewarding the more profitable and larger conferences. He thinks everyone should get a shot at the Championship. A flaw in his argument may be that if we do switch to a tournament system there will always be someone on the line complaining they were left out. Even with 65 teams in the basketball brackets each March there are plenty of upset teams left looking in with anger at the selection process. Selecting 8 will be no different, and in fact much worse.

Under the proposed alternative, a new system would retire the BCS system and implement a 12-member committee (of assholes) charged with deciding who would receive 8 at-large bids in a tournament. The Sugar, Orange, Rose and Fiesta bowls would get to host the four first-round playoff games. ESPN’s 4 year deal with the BCS, worth $125 million per year, extends to the 2014 season. I am sure ESPN would gladly welcome a change to the playoff system before then however and we know our best shot is to get this done under the current Barack Obama adminstration. My guess is that by 2012 we will be watching the end of the football season in tournament format. I expect Utah, Boise State, Notre Dame, and St. Johns (PA) will all be eliminated in the first round by a combined score of 292-9.