I think Ben Smith pretty much sums up of my feelings about the BCS travesty that college football fans are subjected to year after year. It appears though that maybe something might be done before too many more years of college football are concluded.
And what is the reason for that? The same as every other answer to a question like this - money!
Bowl attendance is down again. TV ratings for bowl games are down again. Almost the entire college bowl season is a big bore. Who wants to watch 30+ bowl games, many "featuring" teams who went 6-6 in the regular season?
Another big financial problem for a university accepting bowl bids is that the university must guarantee a number of tickets to be sold. Many universities lose money from playing in a bowl game where they are saddled with thousands of tickets that they cannot sell.
I saw an ESPN feature with West Virginia University Athletic Director Oliver Luck (yes, the father of Andrew Luck) who stated that it was possible that WVU could lose over $1 million dollars by playing in this year's Orange Bowl. He admitted that holding the losses to the high six figures would be a success. And WVU is not alone.
I don't know how university trustees and state government officials can justify that. Clearly the current college bowl system is not realistic. Many bowl games have to disappear and many college football teams have to stay home for the bowl season whether due to not being invited or declining the opportunity in order to save money. But somehow some sanity has to be restored to this entire bowl game system.
If the BCS system was so great, the brilliant marketing people in charge of the NFL would play a regular season, then have sports journalists and computers vote on the team rankings to select the two teams who play in the Super Bowl and any other NFL team than went at least 8-8 could play in a meaningless exhibition game. Think about it.
Don’t fix the BCS, smash it to piecest - Ben Smith | The Journal Gazette
