Tuesday Update - January 16th, 2024
Really Quite a Lot About a Single Book
I have had a strenuous, but glorious past week. I had a wedding to attend in Chicago on Sunday. Though the world (meaning illness, weather, Amtrak, and Southwest Airlines among many other nodes) seemed to conspire to keep me from making it, I was able to make it up to the Windy City and see my best friend since childhood get married in a beautiful ceremony, and I'm so glad that I did so.
That was my only focus from about Thursday to yesterday evening, and the prior two days were mostly spent getting preparing for that weekend and for the upcoming semester at my job. I spent last week with tunnel vision aimed at the main tasks in front of me. I've basically floated outside of culture. Ergo: I don't have much to write about for this update.
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I brought along an old Kindle with a copy of Dan Wetzel's 2011 book Death to the BCS, which was recommended by Stephen Godfrey of
. Wetzel's book is an odd read in 2024. Not only has the BCS been dead for a decade, but its successor's on the way out as well, the four-team playoff, participation in which was defined by purposefully mushy and undefinable parameters (i.e. The Eye Test, Quality Wins, Quality Losses) to be usurped by a twelve-team playoff, one which for the moment has, finally, a set of defined parameters for qualification (i.e. the five best-ranked conference champions are guaranteed qualification).Godfrey's recommendation of the book came accompanied by a standard Godfreyian exasperated sigh after this year's controversial playoff selections prompted some college football fans to wax nostalgic for the old Bowl Championship System used from 1998 to 2013. I felt some of this nostalgia myself. I have my criticisms of the playoff (to put it as quickly as I can: It's furthered the consolidation of feasible competitors at the top, it's shrunken the discursive space around the sport, the committee's parameters have been so fudgy and seem to shift from year to year), but I was a freshman in college when I watched the final BCS national title game, and I don't have as lucid of a memory of the controversy surrounding it as I do the controversy surrounding the current system. I wanted to learn what time and nostalgia and the fact that my team's best season of my lifetime came under the BCS structure had sanded away.
Wetzel's rhetoric was actually the first thing that really got to me. There is a kairotic nature to this book that underlays the entire reading experience: This was published in 2011 and the BCS's contract with broadcasters was set to expire in 2013. Wetzel presented a path forward with this work. This is as much of a proposal for his vision of a sixteen-team playoff as it is a diatribe against the BCS itself. This is reflected in the sense of urgency as well as the accusatory, often antagonistic tone that colors everything. It was initially jarring. He is succinct, he is acerbic, he is well-researched, and he cares -- a potent cocktail that feels refreshingly anachronistic reading in 2024.
I got as tired of the empty-calorie debate-club brand of succinct acerbism that overtook discourse over the course of the 2010s (the type diffused through ever-replenishing springs of YouTube videos named things like "LIBERAL COLLEGE STUDENT OWNED WITH FACTS AND LOGIC"), but I will take the genuine article here with open arms compared to what I see in sports commentary now. It feels nice to get overtaken by Facts and Logic now that my options are sneering cynics recycling stale late-2010s Twitter gags on one side and Pat McAfee on the other. Wetzel's rhetoric is effective, hitting that delightful combination of appeals to logos and pathos in forcing the reader down the same path of rationality so frequently that it overwhelms them, the same way that a series of jabs and hooks to the face eventually knocks one to the mat.
I came to this with the benefit of hindsight (as Wetzel did when examining several other playoff proposals throughout the book) and the understanding that, while things changed, and the BCS, indeed, died, Wetzel's model didn't replace it. I would vastly prefer Wetzel's model, in which sixteen teams would qualify for a single-elimination tournament. Every FBS conference champion would receive an automatic bid (At the time, this was six power conferences and five non-power conferences) and the remainder of the bracket would be filled with at-large bids, and through those at-large bids, independents could qualify. Every game up to the final would be contested at the higher-seeded team's home stadium. The remainder of the teams that didn't qualify for the playoff but finished with at least 6 wins could play in bowl games. The benefits here seem obvious: It would provide genuine, on-field national title chances to everyone, bring exciting games all over the landscape of college football, and give everyone a clear set of criteria to fulfill in order to qualify.
The detriments that shook out during ten years of the College Football Playoff almost exactly mirror the benefits that a sixteen-team model could have presented. Though one non-power-conference team (2021 Cincinnati) was given a path to play for a championship, plenty of others never saw those chances (Unbeaten teams were left out of the playoff half of the time -- it happened in 2016, 17, 18, 20, and 23), or saw those chances given to teams who could put more famous names an otherwise very similar resume (this happened from the start with Baylor and TCU in 2014). Though the playoff semifinals and finals almost always successfully filled NFL stadiums, the accompanying New Year's Six bowls were turned into shells of themselves, about half of the spots populated with frustrated, unmotivated teams, whose fanbases turned apathetic along with them, leaving us with genuinely terrible football products like this year's sparsely-attended and only-by-a-loose-definition-of-the-term-contested Orange Bowl at Hard Rock Stadium.
Until seeing Wetzel's proposal, I hadn't really been able to put my finger on the worst part of the four-team CFP experience, but god, that lack of a clear set of criteria for qualification was the special factor that made the whole deal so maddening. The problem with college football's national championship, dating back to the pre-Coalition days, was that the sport's championship ultimately came down to a set of human interpretations. A team could win all of the games they played, but they wouldn't win a national championship, or they'd have to split a national championship with someone else, a set of people interpreted that another team deserved it more despite the two never playing, which is infuriatingly incongruent with the fact that the entire endeavor itself is built upon the basic fact of two teams playing one another.
Every new thing that tried to solve the problem would make a slight step towards getting there while leaving space for another obvious incongruity to show itself. The BCS guaranteed that two undefeated teams would never again miss one another, but, whoops, then we had more than two undefeated teams in 2004, 2009, and 2010, and whoops, we had fewer than two undefeated teams in 1998 and 2007, but the decision-makers in the polls interpreted that the undefeated team wasn't good enough to play for the championship, or whoops, we had precisely two undefeated teams in 2006 and 2008, but the decision-makers in the polls interpreted that only one of the two undefeated teams were good enough to play for the championship. Then we expanded the chances to four teams, and still it came down to personal interpretation, but this time from a smaller number of individuals who could basically make up their interpretations as they saw fit, and still you'd go undefeated and not receive a chance!
To some extent, there is no truly sensible fashion to determine a single champion from a sport consisting of 130+ teams that only play 12 games per year. It all comes down to human interpretation at some level, the cutoff for the interpretation just shifted down over time. With the BCS, it went from a series of pollsters interpreting the cutoff between #1 and #2 after January 1st to a series of pollsters ballasted by a series of math problems interpreting the difference between who was #2 and #3 before January 1st, then with the CFP it turned into a series of people from several walks of life interpreting the cutoff between #4 and #5. The further it expands, the more tedious the interpretation's going to be anyway. At least qualifying via conference championship would have been something definable. It's much easier to say "sorry you missed the playoff, you should've won your conference" than "sorry you missed the playoff, your quarterback got hurt and we didn't think you'd stand a chance without him" as happened this year. If every conference champion was guaranteed to qualify for a playoff, then at the very least we can say that we have the most accomplished representative from each conference represented. It's truly baffling that it didn't end up like that.
That's what kept hitting me as I read the book - One of the primary problems, that not enough deserving teams got the chance to play one another, was to an extent remedied after this book's publication, but it only got more maddeningly irrational because the remedy was not nearly as extensive as it could have been.
The shifts that have happened in the sport, particularly at the conference alignment level, have been so seismic in the past decade that I doubt that the new playoff will really fix much with regards to the national championship.
One of the central theses of the book is that he wrote it in the midst of a generational shift. There may have been a time in which it was enough to win your conference, give your alumni base an excuse to travel somewhere warm for the New Year, and then let the newsmen decide whether your team was a champion or not, but that time came to an end with the expansion of cable television and the internet throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Fans now clamor for a shot at the title above anything else and will accept no consolation prizes.
Wetzel is correct, but I don't think that I realized how severe this divide was, nor how much further it has expanded, nor that I stood on the antiquated edge of it. I don't think about Kansas with regards to football's national championship and never really have -- mostly because I hardly even had to think about Kansas with regards to qualifying for a bowl game before last year. There is a defined path to the playoff, and thus the National Championship, now. This is, I suppose, better than the previous system, if the point of the sport is to win a national championship, but there's a pyrrhic quality to this change, as the chasm between the Power-2 and the rest of us is only going to grow. As a person who goes to games, I would rather finish the year the way that Mizzou finished 2023, with a win in a nice warm big city, than the way that TCU finished 2022 along with an added caveat that the humiliating blowout comes after paying thousands of dollars to travel to a place like Columbus or State College, getting antagonized by the locals, then freezing my ass off for four hours. That is not worth the pretense of a 'shot' at a national title in my eyes, but that is the way that the wind is blowing and it is probably fairer for everyone.
But, hey! You wrote a thought provoking book, Mr. Wetzel! Good work, I highly recommend it to you, reader.
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HOT TRACK OF THE WEEK:
I want to give credit to SiriusXM Channel 051 The Groove. First time I heard it was on that station, late one summer evening driving around the neighborhoods south of the valley in San Diego and the most recent time I heard it was on this Saturday morning driving out of a cold and windy suburb of St. Louis en route to Chicago, which is much less evocative but takes nothing away from the song nor the station.