Cook: Bowl system could use some retooling

It’s time to change our beloved bowl system, the system that colleges hold so sacred that they have continually used it as an excuse to avoid even considering a playoff system.

The bowls are no longer working in the best interest of the Southeastern Conference. The SEC is getting the short end of the postseason stick because of the way our current system works. This is not exactly a diatribe against the Bowl Championship Series, which is under attack on a lot of fronts.

The problems of the BCS are obvious. Every year there is at least one team that believes the BCS is a rotten system. This year that team is Texas, one of four one-loss teams that believes it is as worthy of playing for the national championship as either of the teams in the title game. But the Longhorns are the only one of them that has a 1-0 record against the teams in the championship game.

The way of selecting the teams in the championship game is not what I am talking about. I’m talking about the rest of the BCS system, the one that has put Alabama in the Sugar Bowl against an undefeated BCS crasher. It is the second consecutive year the Sugar Bowl has been the destination for an SEC team, but not against another BCS team.

Last season Georgia had to face Hawaii, an undefeated team that managed to qualify for the BCS because of the screwy rules that have been devised to keep the non-BCS leagues from taking legal action against the BCS and exposing the little coalition as a monopoly and upsetting the lucrative BCS apple cart.

This year it is Alabama that has to face another BCS crasher. The undefeated Utah Utes might be a good football team, but they are not another BCS team and that devalues the Sugar Bowl for the second consecutive year. Television ratings will not be as good as, say the Fiesta Bowl that boasts a decent matchup in Texas and Ohio State. Sure, the Longhorns will probably stomp the Buckeyes into submission, but it will have more national interest than Utah-Alabama regardless of how good the Sugar Bowl game might turn out to be.

Sugar Bowl executive director Paul Hoolahan and the rest of the Sugar Bowl people probably aren’t happy with the situation either, especially since they had no real say in the matchup. Given a choice, they would have preferred to see a Texas-Alabama matchup that would have matched the No. 3 and No. 4 teams.

But the problem comes with the fact that the BCS bowls have regional ties. The Sugar Bowl takes the highest ranked SEC team available while the Fiesta Bowl has the highest-ranking Big 12 team and the Orange Bowl usually gets the ACC team against a Big East team and, of course, the Rose Bowl has the Big Ten and Pac-10 champs. That leaves very little room for creative bowl matchups.

The BCS holds to the idea that the only reason for its existence is to match the two most deserving teams, theoretically the No. 1 and No. 2 team and nothing else. Far too many times the BCS has fallen short in the No. 1 vs. No. 2 department, other than by its own convoluted ranking system.

So either do away with the entire system, which is not going to happen, or extend it down to matching No. 3 vs. No. 4, No. 5 vs. No. 6 and so forth. Rotate the higher ranked matchups among all the BCS bowls fairly. It would be fair for every bowl, and college football would have a more exciting bowl season, not a more important one, just a more exciting one.

It makes me nostalgic for the good old days when the bowls were not all tied up and the end of the season was like land grab days in the old West as bowls tried to woo the best teams and sometimes two, three or even four games could have a bearing on the eventual national championship, a title that was decided by real human beings and not computers.

As long as we have the BCS matching the top two teams, the other bowl games are meaningless. Whether they are higher paying BCS bowls or any other of the 27 or 28 bowl games, they really don’t matter much in the overall scheme of a college football season.

Of course, they can still be fun and, come to think of it, wasn’t that the whole idea behind bowl games in the beginning?