College Football's Postseason Need Not Emulate March Madness

March Madness is upon us, that magical time of the year when the lure of upsets and successful bracket picks drives the American public into a frenzy. Its good entertainment, good sport, and fun. Its also just about as horrible of a postseason model as one could possibly develop and call itself a 'championship'.

That statement smacks of heresy but there's much truth behind it. Calling an event exciting and worthwhile doesn't exclude it from an assessment that its also failing to fulfill its actual, you know, purpose. In that regard the NCAA tournament is hardly alone, but it has gained a remarkably ridiculous reputation as a great championship and used to browbeat other sports like college football that actually have superior championships.

The reasoning for the NCAA tournament's inadequacy is quite simple. Championships in theory are designed to confer a title upon the best team in the game that year. No championship is perfect, but at a minimum -- an absolute minimum -- the championship should draw from an extensive body of work and/or match teams up in a series of games before advancing.

College basketball, for all its magic, fails to accomplish either.

The entire tournament is nothing more than endless one and done games between teams. We all love the upset but when people talk about college football being unfair, whats fair about clearly superior teams dropping out of a tournament because they ran into an odd matchup or frothed-up smaller program having the game of their life that had very little to do with their actual ability and performance over the course of a season?

The problem is one of sample size, something I've brought up on here before. There's a passage from the groundbreaking baseball book Moneyball by Michael Lewis that gets to the heart of this.



One game upsets are wonderful but if you're actually truly interested in determining the superior team, you're going to have to shake that out in a best of three, five or seven game series. This is actually at least somewhat possible in basketball because games can be played with minimal gaps of time between them. The NCAA instead chooses more teams over a more reliable postseason.

College basketball isn't legitimately interested in answering that question 'who's best?' Otherwise the postseason would be structured much differently. What we have, essentially, is a great tournament and an awful, awful championship. Here's what my colleague Brian Cook -- an advocate of a limited college football playoff -- writes at his site MGoBlog:

Spot on. This isn't to say things aren't wrong with college football's postseason -- there's plenty to critique. However, its clear that particularly in recent years the powers within the game have had much greater interest in addressing the question of who is best and structuring the postseason accordingly.

The weaknesses in college football's postseason are deeply structural. Of primary importance is that schools are playing football, not basketball, within a limited time frame. There aren't 16 regular season games like the NFL. As it is the current expanded 12-game regular season has led to many a person pitching a fit. Within the upper division, there are currently 120 teams. Its an absurd number.

There's simply no fair way to design a postseason for 120 teams. There certainly isn't a reliable method so far to standardize schedules in the manner possible in professional leagues capped at just over 30 teams. So you have this environment with way too many teams, playing not enough games, with deeply uneven schedules and varying methods in determining conference champions. Its a giant mess.

To the extent possible, the BCS at least modestly pieces together these disparate elements in a game driven by perception. Its ultimate goal is to pair the two best programs out there, and draws from a much more reliable pool of 2-5 teams that have separated themselves once all 12 games have been played instead of the 65 possible in the NCAA tournament. The math is obvious, the potential for error so much more in college basketball.

The game's strength, however, remains its regular season, the most competitive in all of sport. There's room for drama and upsets but also just enough time for the programs to generally sort themselves out to where its apparent who the best handful of teams are at the end of the year. Drama and excitement happens on a national level over the course of 12 games instead of a few weeks in march.

Adding a series of one-and-done games is a step backwards. A team's single game performance in a playoff simply and dramatically overrides a carefully coordinated 12-game regular season body of work which is much more indicative of its abilities. This being football, a series of games between teams simply isn't realistic. Whether we realize it or not, we're stuck.

There's two models out there, both have their limitations but only one can even address the superiority question with half-competence within that framework, relying on teams' actual bodies of work rather than subjecting them to the flukes of one game scenarios.

The bottom line in all of this is that while we should enjoy March Madness, its best to recognize just how unfair of a championship it really is and that for all the finger-pointing directed towards the BCS and college football the game is structurally limited in a way that leaves little choice but for something like the BCS if those involved want a realistic and credible championship. The BCS might not be as fun or interesting and some undefeated teams will occasionally get left out (quite often credibly so, Utah this year wasn't even as good as their 2004 team!), but its much more effective than allegedly superior models at sorting out the best team.