Is College Football A Sport?

When at a bar and bored of dull talk, I can always count on one back-pocket conversation piece to kick-start interesting dialogue, regardless of my company.

The game is “Sport/Not a Sport”, and it asks one simple question: Is _________ a sport, or is it not a sport? The game is great because everyone, even non-sports fans, have strong opinions. Women are typically quick to defend gymnastics; guys often advocate rugby. In the last three years, “Sport/Not a Sport” has never failed me, not once, in provoking some interesting barstool conversation.

When judging “Sport/Not a Sport”, I stick to one hard and fast criterion: if a game involves a judge, like figure skating or gymnastics, it’s not a sport. Because my number one standard for a sport, after all, is that its outcomes are settled on the field rather than in the imagination. Based on this standard, the game I love most, college football, must now sadly be reconsidered on its validity as a true sport. With this week’s anointing of Ohio State and LSU as the nation’s two best teams, college football fans have to ask themselves the question: Is this game we love still a real sport?

The NFL selects and seeds its 12 postseason qualifiers based solely on their records. The NBA and the NHL choose 16 on the same criteria. Major League Baseball takes 8. The list goes on; MLS, Wimbledon, the Masters, the World Cup…every major United States sporting event allows its finalists to play off for the title at season or event’s end. Even the NCAA basketball tournament, which does feature a selection process, chooses 64 teams and features one defining caveat: if a team wins their league tournament, they will get a chance to play for the national title.

And yet, college football, the only major American game without a season-ending playoff, is the institution which needs one the most.

Consider this: the most rudimentary of statistical understanding dictates that more trials of a given event will yield more accurate results. For example, flipping a coin 1,000 times will render a heads/tails frequency much closer to the coin’s true nature than doing so just 10 times. And now consider that college football offers its participants the least trials of every major American game. With just 12 games in every season, there are far less trials than the NFL (16), NHL and NBA (82) and Major League Baseball (162). The tiny amount of trials in college football, by comparison, yields a sample size that is woefully inept in its ability to determine a “best team”.

And then there is the matter of cross-pollination. Every NFL team plays 60% of its own conference every single year. Every NBA and NHL team plays every other team in the entire league at least once. There are far more opportunities in these other leagues to judge teams head-to-head, via common opponents, etc. But yet, in college football, top teams rarely, if ever, share a common schedule. Between the six major conference champions (Ohio State, LSU, Oklahoma, USC, West Virginia and Virginia Tech), there was just one head-to-head matchup during this season. How many common opponents did the six teams share? 3, between the 6 (Washington, Miami, Mississippi State), and not a single one of the matchups in question took place after October 20^th.

But see, even now, we are getting off the track. The entire debate, spurred on by the power brokers at ESPN and from the BCS, as to “Who Belongs in the Title Game?” is a red herring, a false choice with no true purpose other than to distract audiences from the lie that is the Bowl Championship Series. With identical records (5 of the above 6 champions have 2 losses) and no shared opponents, it is a puzzle with no interlocking pieces. They all deserve a title shot. There is no answer.

In what true sport would the four teams in competition with one another for a coveted spot (let’s say, Oklahoma, USC, LSU and West Virginia), “compete” against one another, but never see the field of play in the same city on any given Saturday, and have no idea if they had won or lost until the sun rose Sunday morning?

Let us do away, also, with the absurd notion that the BCS system must be preserved because “every week is a playoff.” This idea is ridiculous on its face. If every week were a playoff, Hawaii would be wearing the national championship crown already, as Division I’s only unbeaten team. If every week were a playoff, our two “national championship finalists” would not be teams that had lost their next to last game. If every week were a playoff, it would have to be called a triple-elimination beauty pageant playoff, since two-loss LSU has been selected as the “most impressive” two-loss squad, and given yet another chance at glory in this wackiest of college football seasons.

Advocates of the “every week is a playoff” argument make the crucial mistake of transposing the words “playoff” and “exciting.” No, every week is not a playoff. Every team in the season-end title conversation LOST. So stop with that right now. But yes, every week of football was exciting this season, as exciting as it has ever been.

And do you somehow mean to tell me that if we undertook a system where the 6 major conference winners and the 2 highest rated minor conference winners engaged in an 8 team playoff, things would somehow get less exciting? Do you mean to tell me that if Team A could be guaranteed a spot in the big huzzah by winning its conference title, but have no chance if it didn’t win the conference crown, the year would somehow become less exciting?

No, obviously not. You would have playoff games all over the map on the season’s final day. Missouri v. Oklahoma, LSU v. Tennessee and Virginia Tech v. Boston College would all have been outright, bona fide playoff games, instead of wait-and-see beauty pageants.

If the system rewarded teams for only their conference play, major powers wouldn’t be as afraid to play other powers out of conference. Games like 2005’s Ohio State vs. Texas would become more commonplace. Teams like Hawaii would have a fighting chance of getting a good team to play them, since that team wouldn’t be out of the national title conversation with a loss. Every game would truly matter, so much more so than it does now. It would be great for college football.

And isn’t that was this is supposed to be about? What’s great for college football? Not what’s great for the bowl executives, running their bowls like the exhibition-match, civic events that they are, picking teams who will “draw more” and not teams that are the best available? Not great for the networks, who are somehow convinced that they can squeeze more coverage out of the insulting “Who’s #1” debate instead of the undeniable cash cow that would be a playoff? Isn’t it supposed to be fair?

In closing, I ask you, fan of college football: what real sport would stand for this? What real sport would allow its greatest prize, the crown jewel of America’s favorite past time, the National Championship of College Football, to be decided by judges? What makes college football different now from figure skating, gymnastics, and the like? When records do not matter (LSU has more losses than Kansas and Hawaii combined), when the top teams in consideration never play each other, when the coveted bowls choose teams based on projected attendance instead of quality, what are we left to do other than wonder why the regular season even matters?

Why play a conference championship game, like Missouri did, when losing will put you below the team you just beat (Kansas) the previous week? Why play a season at all when you’re Hawaii, and you are the only team in the entire nation to go undefeated, but you can’t get anyone to come to the islands to play you? Why do it? What does it matter?

I have nothing against LSU. They are as good a choice as any given the false choice with which we have been presented. They may very well be the 1^st, 2^nd or 5^th best football team in the country. No one alive could make a convincing argument that LSU is definitively better or worse than Ohio State, Oklahoma, West Virginia, Virginia Tech, USC or Hawaii.

As the old adage goes, “That’s why they play the games.”

Except in college football, they don’t.