I'm not ashamed to tell you that New Year's is one of my favorite holidays, next to Halloween, of course. This burns my wife's ass as she is as into christmas as an atheist can be and 12/25 is my least favorite day on the calendar. I love getting together with family and friends and just enjoying NYE/NYD. And, of course, the football.
This year Tennessee got to a bowl game they deserved to be in, the Outback Bowl. I'm graciously overlooking that they had plenty of chances to beat LSU in the SEC championship game, hence earning a trip to the Sugar Bowl. Their bowl record has never been stellar (roughly .500), so it was good to see them win one against a reasonably good team.
Like most college football fans, I think that the current BCS format stinks. Every few years the two best teams are clear at the end of the season and get matched up in the final game (think USC vs. Texas a couple of years ago). But most years there are too many teams who finish with similar records so someone almost always gets screwed.
The NCAA says that their shouldn't be a Division I football playoff because doing so would ruin the regular season and keep the student athletes out of class too much. However, the real reason is that they are convinced that the current bowl structure earns them the most money. After all EVERY OTHER NCAA sport has a championship tournament. It doesn't seem to be hurting their regular seasons or grades.
The most intransigent of the bowl games is the Rose. In fact, the Rose Bowl was the last to sign on to any changes in the bowl games to release teams from conferences which were obligated to a particular game so they could play for the national championship. Then again, change is not part of the Rose Bowl's DNA. I think they finally stopped doing hymen checks on the rose princess and her court about five years ago.
To their credit, the Rose Bowl committee makes no bones about not wanting to change. They have the best and most storied of the bowl games. Old time SEC fans still talk about when their teams got to play in the Rose Bowl before it moved to the now traditional Big 10 vs. Pac 10 match up (UT got shut out by USC both times they came in 1940 and 1945). But they also make it clear that they don't give a shit about helping crown the best team in college football. Hell, this year they showed that they didn't even want the best game if it stood in the way of their tradition.
USC basically fell in their laps and at the end of the season the Trojans were playing arguably the best football. Since the Rose Bowl lost Ohio State to the BCS championship game, they could have taken just about any other team to play SC. Like, oh, I don't know, Georgia, who was also playing arguably the best football at the end of the season. Sure, they would have to ask the Sugar Bowl to get Georgia, which they wouldn't have done, but they at least could have asked. Or selected Missouri. But, the Rose Bowl thought tradition was more important and reached waaaaay down to select Illinois from the Big 10 to play USC. By doing this they turned one potentially really good game (USC vs. Georgia/Missouri) into two shitty blowouts (USC crushed Illinois and Georgia hammered an over matched Hawaii).
I doubt that if there were a playoff that we'd be having an Ohio St. vs LSU game for the championship. But who knows? I've stopped getting mad about the lack of a playoff. It's not going to change until at least 2014 (when the Rose Bowl's current deal with ABC is up), but probably not then either.
As always, I think OSU is overrated. LSU 28 OSU 17.
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