Ethics 101
What college sports teach students about equity
What is worth tens of millions of dollars annually, has inspired a political action committee to reform it, and retains a former White House press secretary to defend it?
Answer: the Bowl Championship Series (BCS).
Last night, the final line-ups for all 33 of college football’s season ending bowl games were announced. The capstone to scores of lesser bowl games, decided largely by individual bowl invitations, will be the five “BCS Bowls”: the Rose Bowl, the Orange Bowl, the Sugar Bowl, the Fiesta Bowl and the National Championship Game.
Why so much contoversey over college football?
The reason has a lot to do with the stakes. In addition to determining the national champion, the bowl games pay out money to participating universities and conferences. Lesser bowls can pay out less than $1 million, whereas BCS games are worth over $10 million to the football conferences represented.
Against these incentives is a system that draws substantial ire from football fans of all stripes. That’s because the BCS bowl games are determined by a complex formula that includes two major newspaper rankings and a series of computer calculations. Unlike other major sports, which subject a reduced field of teams to a seeded tournament, college football plays a regular season and then goes straight to the bowl games (with conference championship games in select conferences).
This can create “left-outs” — an undefeated team that cannot play in the national championship game. That’s exactly what has happened this year. The University of Alabama and the University of Texas are the #1 and #2 ranked teams in the BCS, and will vie for the national championship. The #3 ranked team, the University of Cincinnati, is also undefeated, but will play in the Sugar Bowl. It’s a BCS game, sure, but it’s no national championship.
Accusations of inequity go still further because the BCS games are reserved for only six of the 12 major NCAA Division I conferences. No matter how low its BCS ranking, the conference champion from each of these conferences has a right to participate in a BCS bowl game. The other six conferences can send teams, but they must either be ranked in the top 12 of the BCS or ranked in the top 16 and higher than a conference champion from a BCS conference (confused yet?).
This year that happened–twice. There are two undefeated teams, Texas Christian University and Boise State University, that are ranked in the top six and have gone undefeated. They have both been granted berths to BCS bowl games. Predictably, they are facing each other.
Many football purists, including legislators and our president, would prefer to see a playoff system determine the national championship.
One reason that sports determine champions through playoffs is in part to ensure that top teams have an opportunity to face each other–supposedly a more just metric.
Of course, commentators tend to talk up the advantages of playoffs, while rarely acknowledging their flaws. In 2001, the Seattle Mariners baseball team won 116 of 162 regular season games–a regular season record. They lost in the second round of the playoffs — dismissed in a best of seven contest — and were therefore unable to compete for baseball’s title of World Series Champion.
One could reasonably argue that they were the best team. After all, any statistician would tell you that we learn a lot more over the course of 162 games than we do in seven. A smaller sample size provides more space for chance to rear its ugly head.
But something about a playoff, where two teams survive a slew of opponents and then face off against each other, tends to make us feel as though justice was done.
The real inequity of the BCS is the limited payout available to the six “other” major conferences who do not have guaranteed berths. Earlier in the century, this may have been justified. Those conferences did not produce the same caliber of team as the major conferences, nor did they invest the same resources in their programs. But the gap has narrowed, as evidenced by the growing success of some of these teams against BCS teams.
The payout differences between bottom-tier bowl games and the BCS are an order of magnitude. There may be reason to go a playoff, but it’s not to determine the “real” champion. It’s to give every school a realistic shot at the same pie.
-Sam
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- College sports inequities
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- What is the educational value of intercollegiate sports?
- Should sports be protected from international politics?
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