The Buckerine Files: It's the Game, Not the Teams

Above: An action shot from a soon-to-be irrelevant game between the Alabama and LSU.

Every college football season produces a unique story. The tumult and chaos of dozens of teams playing hundreds of games accumulates into a whirling narrative arch told in installments on autumnal Saturdays. The tale of a college football season inevitably changes and twists so many times that even on reflection the outcome can seem hard to believe. Sometimes the story features a series of upsets and the crowning of an unexpected champion. Other times the season becomes a legend for dominant teams and players. The 2011 season should be approaching its own dramatic climax with the final games before bowl season about to begin. However this season will likely end -to crib a line from Eliot- not with a bang but a whimper.

When the LSU Tigers faced the Alabama Crimson Tide on November 5, 2011, they were ranked Number One and Two respectively in pretty much every college football poll. After LSU won the game, they secured the top position in the rankings and had a clear path to the national championship. That's all to be expected given the number of high-profile wins the Tigers had accumulated during the season and the level of respect SEC teams receive from the poll voters. The story gets strange when you follow the Tide's role (Does that even count as a pun?) in this saga.

After Alabama lost at home to LSU in a game where two field goals accounted for the entirety of their scoring, the voters dropped them from second all they way down to third. This put just-defeated Alabama ahead of such then undefeated teams as Stanford, Boise State, and Houston, as well as all other one-loss teams, including Oregon and Virginia Tech. In the subsequent weeks, all credible candidates for the national championship besides the Tide and Tigers suffered a defeat or other setback allowing Alabama to return to the two-spot almost by default. This puts us back where we were on November 5th, except now when the two teams play, it won't be to determine the winner of the SEC West Division but the BCS National Championship.

With the polls shrugging their collective shoulders, college football fans have been asked to resign themselves to rematch in the championship game. Well, I have decided not to accept such a loathsome fate without making a stand. So I have written this blog post to present my arguments for why a rematch for the title is the least desirable outcome of a college football season. I cannot expect that some random blog post will change the course of events, but I will only be able to sleep peacefully if I know I have publicized my opinions. (Well that and if I find an effective treatment for my restless leg syndrome, but that's another story for another day.) Still, I encourage everyone who reads my arguments and finds them persuasive to share them with others. I fear the only hope we may have to avoid the worst of all possible title games is for public opinion to reject it so strongly the poll voters will have to take notice.

Above: The logo on the official BCS Twitter featuring a motto that a rematch would invalidate.

You can't find many people outside of Tuscaloosa arguing that there should be a rematch in the BCS Championship Game. More often you hear various members of the sports media framing LSU-'Bama II as an inevitability. Those who seek to rationalize the poll voters' apparent absolution of the Tide make a fairly straightforward argument. They claim that any honest -albeit subjective- assessment of all the college football teams would judge LSU and Alabama to look like the two best overall teams this season. If you accept that -or at least concede no other team appears obviously better than Alabama- then you must give them the chance to play for the title, because they believe the championship game should be decided on the field between the two best teams. Certainly, it is hard to point to any team you would favor to win a game against either of these SEC goliaths. You'll have a hard time arguing against it, even if you claim the championship game should be for the most deserving teams instead of the two best teams. Almost no teams other than LSU have had a particularly meritorious season so far. So this simple argument looks fairly ironclad.

Controversially, I find fault with the baseline assumptions of the "two best teams" argument. I would contend that anyone who determines participants in a title game based on the evaluation of the teams, has missed something fundamental in the BCS structure. With all the complaints you hear about the lack of a playoff in college football, it is easy to forget that there is a playoff. It is unfortunately the worst kind of playoff, a one game, two team affair, that decides the championship. It may not look that different than the old "bowl and poll" system, but in fact a major shift occurred with the creation of a BCS championship game. No longer do we have to determine a champion based solely on subjective judgements. Now we have a game that decides the issue. We have changed the fundamental unit used to determine national championships in college football. It is no longer about the teams. Now it is about the game. When you realize that the outcome of the game is meant to be the only factor dictating the title, you realize that the BCS should not be trying to determine which two teams are best, but which two teams will produce the best game.

When I say "best game", I don't mean to ask for the game that would provide the most entertainment, but the game that would provide the most evidence. I want to see whichever pairing of teams that will give the winner the strongest proof that they are the best team in the nation. In most years this would be the top two teams, as a win over one would improve the other's resume so much that their body of work would almost have to be better than any other team's. However in the case of LSU v. Alabama, and all other potential rematches, that is no longer relevant as one team has already beaten the other. A second win by the first game's victor does little to improve their resume, and a triumph by the earlier loser only creates an impossibly unclear comparison.

Therefore, I must assert that the college football world would be best served by seeing a national championship game between LSU and Oklahoma State, or Stanford, or Virginia Tech, or Boise State, or any other team that they have not already defeated. That means Alabama may well be the second best team in the country, but their participation in the title game does not produce a definitive result. (All of this also applies to the Oregon Ducks, another team that LSU defeated during the regular season, but practically no one seems to be claiming they deserve a rematch.)

Think of it this way, right now the general consensus holds that LSU is the best team in the country in the same way we used to determine the championship before the BCS. We can only think they are the best based on subjective evaluations. However when comparing them to Alabama we know they are better, because they already played a game and the Tigers won. If you want validation that the result of that game is empirical proof of LSU's superiority, then I direct you to Alabama and LSU's own conference the SEC. The SEC has placed LSU in their conference championship game and has given them the chance to prove they are the best team in that conference. Alabama has no such chance. If the conference is satisfied by the outcome of November 5th, the voters in the polls should be too.

There are other arguments I could bring against Alabama -pointing to their body of work or other teams', denying a team that didn't win its conference a chance to win the national title- but I do not believe those are necessary. The result of the earlier game has made any rematch unnecessary. The proponents of a college football playoff often say "prove it on the field". In this case that proof is already available, and we do not need to waste the BCS title game by retesting those results.

The tone of the media in this case has been largely resigned. The rematch is often called "inevitable", but that is not the case. The humans who vote in the opinion polls have the ability to determine who will participate in the BCS Championship Game. If enough people talk about why a rematch is unacceptable, maybe the scales will fall from their eyes, and they will vote for a different match-up. So once again I encourage anyone who agrees with this argument to share it with others. Let's give this college football season a finale worth watching.