Bowl Season

Look, there can't be anyone at all who can come up with a solid reason why big-time college football doesn't have a playoff system in place.

Any of the reasons that usually come up in defense of the current bowl system are all hollow, and everyone knows it. In reality, the current system accomplishes all kinds of things that the powers-that-be don't want to mess with, such as 1) giving 70 of 120 FBS coaches the chance to say they reached the postseason and 2) for the most part shutting out the non-BCS conferences, directing the overwhelming percentage of the money to the most powerful leagues.

Think if college basketball worked the same way. How many college basketball coaches from big conferences have lost their jobs because they haven't been able to take their team to the NCAA tournament?

To TigerBlog, there are two completely ridiculous parts of the current system.

First, there are 12 teams that reached bowl games who needed wins to prevent themselves from having a losing record.

Second, the championship game between Oregon and Auburn takes place 37 days after either team last played. Put in NFL terms, the AFC and NFC championship games are set for Jan. 23; if the winners waited as long to have their championship game, then the Super Bowl would be March 1.

Another problem with the current setup is that other than the BCS title game, no other bowls matter.

When TB was a kid, the bowls were much more condensed, because there weren't as many. In 1970, there were only 11 bowl games played; this year there will be 35.

So while most of those 11 games didn't mean much in terms of having a national champion, they did mean something because each one was special in its own right. Eventually, the number more than tripled, and the names of the bowls, with their corporate sponsorship, makes it nearly impossible to distinguish one from another.

This year, even the FCS (TB still prefers the term "I-AA") got in on the silliness. The tournament plays out on the weekends, except that last weekend was Christmas and this one is New Year's. Because of that, the championship game between Delaware and Eastern Washington won't be played until Jan. 7, or three weeks after the teams won their semifinal games.

It's been 39 days since Ivy League football season ended, and it seems like even longer than that.

Again, the more TigerBlog thinks about it, the more he thinks that there's way more to like than not like about the way Ivy League football works. There are 10 weeks with 10 games, no off weeks. It's as much of a sprint as anywhere the sport is played.

Princeton, for instance, played its entire season in a 69-day window.

Oregon, when it takes the field against Auburn, will be finishing its season 128 days after its first game, a 72-0 win over New Mexico on Sept. 4.

At the same time, there are issues facing Ivy League football, some of which are outside of the league's control. The biggest is what direction the Patriot League goes in.

The Patriot presidents recently tabled for two years a proposal to adopt football scholarships across the board. Still, two years isn't a very long time, and it's not hard to envision any number of things happening, not the least of which is the breakup of the league itself, at least for football.

How does this affect the Ivy League? Well, of the 24 non-league games the Ivy teams played this year, 17 were against Patriot teams.

If the Patriot teams go in different directions, the possible opponents for the Ivy League dwindles. If they all go scholarships, that could be even worse for the Ivy League, since it would impact scheduling and probably recruiting.

And of course, any discussion of Ivy League football in the future has to include whether or not there's going to come a day when the league champion plays in the playoffs or if there'll ever be an 11th game.

For TigerBlog, though, the rest of college football could do worse than follow what the Ivy League now has, rather than the other way around.