BCS Bowl Selection

       Hi Bloggers!  I usually exclusively cover Iowa football, but the bowl system has pissed me off so much that I feel people need to know.  I have two major problems with the bowl system.  First, there is too much fighting over money to conferences and “saved” BCS spots.  Secondly, the non-automatic qualifying teams get too many undeserved BCS spots.  It really impacts the game.  Instead of bowl games people want to see, the BCS is creating games based on money.
Usually I don’t mind giving automatic bids to the winners of the big conferences.  One of them usually does very well and deserves to be a BCS bowl game.  However, sometimes a conference champion doesn’t deserve to be in a BCS bowl because their competition was weak and they had less than 9 wins.  This year, the perfect example is Wisconsin and Louisville.  Wisconsin for starters lost five games in a mediocre Big Ten.  They barely deserve the Outback Bowl.  I mean common.  You lose to a bad Michigan State team and then can’t post a single big win game until the championship.  There should be a rule that the conference can lose its guaranteed bid if the winner has less than 9 wins.
Louisville upsets me more than Wisconsin.  Wisconsin actually had to verse good teams every week.  Louisville didn’t play anyone hard and they still lose two games.  The Big East is the biggest joke of a conference and still gets an automatic bid.  They lost to a bad Syracuse team and Connecticut.  That conference doesn’t deserve a bid because everyone in the conference is mediocre.  They rank below the MAC, WAC, and all the other small conferences.  If Louisville goes to the BCS this year, you might as well throw in Iowa.  This conference has no good teams left and should be stripped of its automatic BCS status.  Leave the automatics for the SEC, Big Ten, Big Twelve, and PAC Twelve.  They (for the most part) deserve them.
There is an undeserved non-automatic qualifying team this year.  They finished outside the top 14 and still made it into the BCS.  I am talking about NIU, the same NIU that lost to the 4-8 Hawkeyes.  This is so stupid!  NIU does have an awesome QB, but they haven’t recorded any big wins and have a horrendous loss.  If you are not in an A.Q. conference, you need to be spotless.  NIU was not.  Close wins and a loss to Iowa is way to spotty to give them a BCS bid, especially when you consider the teams left out.  Those teams include Georgia, Oklahoma, Texas A&M, South Carolina, LSU, and Clemson.  These are all teams that deserve a BCS spots.  They all have big wins, the biggest of which was when the 10-2 Aggies beat Alabama in Tuscaloosa.  How do you give an 8-5 Wisconsin team, a 10-2 Louisville team, or a NIU team a BCS bid when the Aggies have a 10-2 record with a much harder schedule?  The answer is simple.  MONEY!  That is it!  We could see the good games we all want to see, but that would give too much money to the Big Twelve and SEC (for this year).  The conferences are all about the money and they will do anything they can to protect it.  This is why we have an 8-5 Wisconsin team playing the Rose Bowl.
I am so happy that we are moving away from this BCS system but I fear the four team playoff will not be better.  With ten deserving teams a year, conference champions will get first dibs and maybe the occasional non-AQ team.  The fifth team will always complain, and they have a right to.  Should Florida be denied a playoff spot because they didn’t win the SEC?  I don’t think this system will iron out until we have a ten team playoff.  That will never happen because it takes too much away from college education.  We are stuck in a subjective picks for the playoffs and bowl games base on money.  At least the NFL has it right.

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