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Playoffs are no panacea

I'm normally not much of one for college basketball (and not for pro hoops at all, since the season is apparently 19 months long), but I caught some of the second half of last night's NCAA men's basketball tournament championship between Florida and UCLA. No question that Florida was the better team in the game, but I find it odd to watch a team that appears to dunk every time they're supposed to lay-up.

But King Kaufman, writing in Salon, comes closest to pointing out the problem with this entire concept:

This fantastic NCAA Tournament, so impossibly good through four rounds, ended with three routs. The law of averages must have caught up. Apparently, all the games can't be white-knuckle jobs.

But for all the upsets along the way, for the lack of No. 1 seeds in the Final Four, the Tournament spit out a worthy champion. Wind this Tournament up and play it again and you'd almost certainly get four different teams in Indianapolis.

But this time around, Florida was the matchup nobody could match. Except for Georgetown in the Sweet 16 round, nobody came close. UCLA sure didn't, a mere two days after the Bruins had looked like world-beaters.

By "worthy champion," Kaufman means "played the best in the tournament," not "best team in NCAA basketball this year." There's not a sportswriter in the country who thinks that any of this year's Final Four - Florida, UCLA, LSU, George Mason - was the "best team" this year. The winner of the NCAA tournament is rarely the best team - just the team that mounted a six-game winning streak under heavy pressure.

Florida finished its regular season with second place in the SEC East, and tied for third in the overall SEC. Counting last night's tournament win, Florida ended the 2005-2006 season at 33-6. Both Florida and UCLA entered the final game with a 32-6 record. Connecticut, knocked out before the Final Four, exited the season at 30-4, meaning that school had three fewer losses entering the tournament than did either of the teams in the championship.

Whiny hacks like Kaufman who continually call for college football playoffs point to the NCAA tournament as a "success story" for how major college athletics can have a big playoff system. First, as I've pointed out many times before, the logistics for football dwarf those for basketball. A major college football game attracts upwards of 60,000 (and often 80,000) people, and each school brings somewhere between 200 and 600 students to the game, counting support staff, cheerleaders, and band. Basketball games rarely top 15,000 except in the NCAA Finals, to which tickets are blindly sold more than a year in advance, and the student complement from each school barely reaches 100 including a band. You can have another basketball game next week without earth-shattering planning. Not true for football.

But ignoring that elephant in the room, the NCAA tournament is not a shining success - it's a free-for-all. Regular season success does nothing more than give you a shot against 64 other schools, and you often have to play farther away from home than you ever did in the regular season. (OU's first and only game in this year's tournament was in Jacksonville, FL - a trip that wouldn't be possible with a large student contingent because it's too far to drive for a Thursday game.)

An NCAA basketball team plays its 30 games in the regular season, and if it loses five or fewer, it's pretty much guaranteed a spot in the tournament. Otherwise, the regular season gets thrown out and you go to a conference tournament, usually not near home, where the team that mounts the 4-game winning streak gets the "automatic" bid to the tournament. Then it's off to play one game every two days for three weekends in a row, maybe three time zones away, maybe at 9 AM or 10 PM in your home time zone.

The playoffs in the NFL and major league baseball work because they're relatively small. Only 12 of 32 NFL teams get a chance to continue the season after 16 games - the eight that won their divisions, and the four others that form the top two non-division-winners of each conference. There's no round-robin divisional tournament to determine which eight teams get "automatic playoff spots" and then a selection committee for the other four slots; it's based on regular season play. In baseball, the three division winners in each conference plus the single team with the best record that didn't win a division go on to the post-season. That's eight teams out of 32.

Compare that to the NBA, where 16 of 30 teams go on to the post-season, playing an endless round of best-of-7 series against each other until the season finally ends with a gigantic "OH GOD PLEASE JUST MAKE IT STOP THIS THING HAS BEEN GOING ON FOREVER."

I've said before that this is one reason I like football: every game counts. It's less true in MLB than the NFL, because baseball teams play 162 games per season instead of the 16 games that NFL teams play. I can be cool with that because baseball is a slower game; pitchers can't even play every day and stay in top shape. I don't watch a lot of regular-season games because they don't count for much, but a losing streak of 10-15 games in a season can be disastrous for a baseball team because only eight teams go to the post-season.

In basketball, almost no game counts for anything, and doubly so in NCAA basketball. A team can quite literally start out 5-10, then build up to 16-15 and run through the conference and NCAA tournaments to win the championship. In any other sport, a team that ends the regular season just about 50% would be very very lucky to get anywhere near the post-season. Not in basketball, though, where mediocrity during the season is only a slight impediment to playing for the championship.

Understand that I'm not knocking Florida here (except for confusing dunks and lay-ups). They played a great tournament and deserved to win the tournament. I'm just saying that in any other sport, they wouldn't have been playing in a championship tournament at all, because their regular season wasn't good enough. It's hard for me to get into a sport where two-thirds of the "season" is meaningless.

Yet sportswriters love it. Not because the best team wins, but because it gives them a story. There was more ink spilled in the last week on George Mason University's unlikely appearance in the Final Four than on the other three teams combined, and as Kaufman points out, all three of the final games were routs. He freely admits these four teams were not the best in the field, and that it's unlikely they could return to the Final Four if the same tournament were to be replayed.

It's not about merit, it's about drama. When sportswriters have to assign merit to teams, like in their regular polls, they want to remain anonymous, act as a collective, follow unwritten rules of dropping a team's rank if they lose even if the teams below are not better, and avoid all responsibility for the results.

Nowhere is this more true than in NCAA football, where the sportswriters eagerly rank teams every week, and award their own national championship, yet insist that no one pay attention to them and think they're actually deciding bowl games or rankings of teams. Sportswriters are, as a lot, moral cowards: they want to shout for four months that a given team is the best, but they run away and hide when that assessment is part of awarding the trophies, even though they give their own trophy to the team they like best.

The BCS is the worst of both post-season systems by necessity. There's not going to be a college playoff system. It's too expensive, it's at the wrong time of the year for schools, and the only people who really want it are sportswriters that are too cowardly to stand by their own convictions. They want more drama to write about, and they couldn't give a good damn if the best team wins or not.

Even so, through last year, the BCS teams are the winners of the six biggest football conferences and two at-large teams. Three of those conferences now have a single championship game, but the six teams who play in those games are the ones who made the best of their regular season. Texas whined its way into the BCS after the 2004 season because, for the fourth time in five years, Texas couldn't win its conference division to earn a spot in the conference championship game.

After Texas won the 2005 BCS National Championship (and I do believe they earned it, grumble grumble), there was a lot of talk about how QB Vince Young "lost only two games as a starter." Guess what? Those two games were to Oklahoma, Texas's biggest conference division rival. It doesn't matter if Texas went 7-1 in conference play every year if Oklahoma went 8-0, or if OU went 7-1 and beat Texas (because that gives OU the tiebreaker, having won a head-to-head match).

After that happened again in 2004, Mack Brown whined to the media about it, and got enough poll votes to squeeze into the BCS top 4, guaranteeing an automatic bid to a BCS game (since OU played USC for the championship and got the automatic Big XII bid). Now, if anything, Brown had a small point: if this were the NFL or MLB, his team would have gotten an automatic bid for having one of the best records without winning a division. But the NCAA is not the NFL - all teams don't play at the same level. A team that goes 9-2 in the Mountain West probably could not do the same in the Big Ten, the Pac 10, or the Big XII.

That's just how it is. The 32 NFL teams are divided into two conferences, each with four divisions of four teams each. An NFL team plays 16 games: six against its divisional opponents (both home and away), four against opponents from another division in the conference, four against opponents from a division in the other conference, and two games against the other teams in the same conference who finished with the same rank last year. For example, a team that finished third in Division X in one conference this year plays the other three teams in Division X both at home and away, plays all teams from Division W in the same conference, plays all teams from Division B in the other conference, and plays the third-place teams from Divisions Y and Z in their own conference. (They already play the third-place team from Division W because they play every team from Division W.)

The schedule includes four games against the other conference and a total of 13 different opponents, so each team plays against 40% of the teams in the league. The NCAA, however, has 116 Division IA football teams and allows a 12-game season. No team could possibly play more than 10% of the other Division I-A teams. There's no way to get schedule equality among all Division I-A teams. In any given year, there's general agreement that no more than ten teams deserve a shot at some kind of "playoff," but if you break up the conferences and assign schedules randomly, most of the powerhouse schools are going to play 12 games against the 90% of teams that have no shot at the title. At least with the conference system, Texas plays OU every year. Ohio State plays Michigan, FSU plays Miami, Alabama plays Auburn, and so on. Sure, OU plays Baylor, Ohio State plays Minnesota, and Miami plays Duke, but NFL teams play weak divisional and conference opponents as well.

The BCS tries to be the NFL, but the unequal NCAA conference system doesn't allow the purely mathematical selection process that the NFL enjoys. There are only four BCS bowl games - five, starting this year, with the championship being extracted from the normal "bowl" system - so they can't really take 12 teams. The schools want in BCS games because the payouts are big, but ABC just passed on renewing the BCS contract because the ratings didn't justify the money that the BCS bowls asked (and it appears that Fox paid less than the BCS wanted).

In other words, you can't just add four more BCS games to take the champions of every conference: the money isn't there. Nor are networks or fans going to pay big money to see playoff games between Boise State and Arkansas State when Texas and USC are playing elsewhere. And how fair would it be to pit Texas vs. USC in one round of a playoff game while Boise State plays Arkansas State in another round? You'd have to seed it based on record or ranking, and everyone knows the small teams would generally get picked off one by one.

If a Boise State made it to the BCS championship and won, it would be great drama, and that's all sportswriters want. They're perfectly happy to dump mediocre teams in a huge tournament with the best and wash their hands of it all, as they've proven with basketball. But doing so is not only impractical, it would trivialize the regular season for most conference and divisions: just be 'good enough' to get picked and then worry about the rest.

The BCS tries its best: they take the teams that win the six biggest conferences and two at-large teams, giving preference to those that make the top four rankings as amalgamated from a poll of sportswriters and coaches, and several computer rankings. They're trying to create a good championship game and three other good games, and more often than not, they succeed. The pre-BCS system would not have allowed OU vs. FSU in 2000, Ohio State vs. Miami in 2002, and Texas vs. USC in 2005.

The biggest problems come from sportswriters who demand the right to crown champions and then run away when the BCS believes them. The sportswriters would much rather prefer a system like the NCAA basketball tournament that takes over half of the schools in the country and throws them together to see what happens, or an NFL-style system that's based on pure numbers and playoff games. Neither is possible in the 116-school Division IA college football race - the schedule inequities rule out pure math, and there's just no way to hold huge playoff tournaments. That means the teams that did the best in the regular season go to a selection committee that's constrained by mathematical rules to avoid favoritism wherever possible, and the BCS games go to those teams.

In other words, it's the BCS we know and hate. It's not a bad system, and it usually does exactly what they want it to do. It just doesn't do what the sportswriters want, which is weekly drama with no responsibility for standing by their own assessments of the best teams, so every year, the BCS admins revise their formula to give the sportswriters what they say they wanted instead of what they got, which was the choice of the best teams.

The sportswriters will never be satisfied, though, so trying to placate them is useless. The BCS system is imperfect, but it works pretty well to determine the best teams in college football - not the ones who might make a tournament run, or the ones that are easiest to like, but the best ones. The sportswriters will always hate that, and the BCS should have the balls to tell them to go pound sand.

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