BCS Armageddon

As Mergz succinctly showed, the Gators could get royally screwed by the BCS system. But forget about the Gators for a second. This blog has been outspoken about the farce that is the "National Championship" in college football since it's inception. This despite the fact that that our beloved Gators came out on top in 2006 and may still come out on top this year. This system sucks, plain and simple. J.A. Adande just exposed the ridiculousness of this system in about 60 seconds on ESPN's Around the Horn.

The theory behind the BCS is simple enough, the top two ranked teams should face each other to determine the championship. Of course that's where logic ends and horseshit begins. With 119 teams in the FBS division attempting to select the "two best" is folly, especially when you consider the small sample size that a regular season in college football yields.

Since there's no clear cut way to select the top two teams, there's a lot of room for interpretation. Is it the two teams that are playing the best right now? Is it the two teams that amassed the best resume? Can a conference non-champion actually be the "National Champion"? Should we allow for a rematch of a game we have already seen?

The big problem I have is that the BCS system is predicated on the faulty premise that voters are not being influenced by the process that they are a part of. The fact is that voters are VERY AWARE of the process and how the automated (computer) part of the process is likely to behave so they are going to cast their votes accordingly to reach a premeditated outcome. This may help or hurt the Gators but that's really besides the point. What's the point in having computers if the humans can accurately predict what the computers will do and counterbalance the result?

This is CRAZY.

The computers are theoretically free of bias but there's another HUGE problem here. By BCS dictates, the computers can't take margin of victory into account, a constraint it does not place upon human voters. The resulting computer rankings deviate dramatically from what they might show if MoV was taken into account. For example, the top ranked team in Sagarin's PREDICTOR rating is USC, followed closely by Florida. But the politically correct ELO_CHESS rating that Sagarin uses for BCS purposes gives both teams much less love with the Trojans ranked 8th and the Gators ranked 6th. So here you have a computer guru whose model says USC should be playing Florida in the national championship game but the BCS requires him to use a model that has Oklahoma vs. Texas playing a game nobody outside of Austin and Norman wants to see.

This is why I can't get emotionally invested in the BCS. To me the top prize for my Gators is winning the SEC championship. It's unambiguous, it's real, it's legitimate. Everything else is frankly concocted bullshit.