On January 8tth, 2007, NCAA Division I-A football teams Ohio State and Florida will come head-to-head in one of this year’s most anticipated events in college sports: the BCS National Championship Game. Not surprisingly, sports fans, reporters, and T.V. personalities have already made much conjecture and have engaged in heated debate about the outcome of the game—some have probably even wagered money on the final score. Yet while the general topic of discussion seems to be the final result of the game, how Ohio State and Florida have arrived at the championship has elicited little, if any, discussion.

Traditionally, every major professional U.S. sport determines its league champion using a playoff system. Following the end of the regular season, the top teams in each league, as determined by their final win-loss records, advance into a post-season bracket. The leading teams play each other in either head-to-head match-ups or a series of games with the winning team advancing onto the following round. Once only two teams remain, they compete against each other for the championship title. By virtue of its fairness and effectiveness, the playoff system has become the preferred method of most professional and college sports—that is, except Division I-A football.

Instead, college football follows a system called the Bowl Championship Series (BCS). The ranking system works as follows: two-thirds of a school’s ranking derives from polls of coaches and sports writers; the remaining one-third is determined by computer programs that rank teams based on various qualities deemed ‘desirable’ in a college football team, such as “schedule competitiveness” and “wins.”

Yet the BCS system inherently favors big-name schools over smaller, perhaps more deserving ones. In the Coach’s Poll, for example, a particular school might obtain a higher ranking simply by virtue of its popularity or recognizable name. Additionally,

the computer polls give equal weight to scheduling—a quality consistently stronger in the larger schools that participate in major conferences like The Big 10—and actual performance.

For example, according to BCS computers, the undefeated Boise State Broncos are lower-ranked than two two-loss teams in the computer rankings simply because the Broncos don’t belong to a big-money conference. This sort of ranking has resulted in the entrance into a BCS bowl of only one school from a non-big-money conference—Utah. No small conference schools have qualified for the championship game.

These inadequacies would be of less concern if a significant number of teams could realistically qualify for the championship game. Yet through the BCS system, only two teams—the one and two seeds—play in the final game of the year, leaving the remaining 115 other teams in the dust. How can one determine, definitively, that two particular teams are superior and worthy of championship candidacy when the basis for assessment is only about ten in-season games? Many times, schools are ruled out even though they have not competed with the top two teams.

This year, the top three teams were Ohio State, Florida, and Michigan, respectively. Ohio State was unanimously elected the number one seed. Florida and Michigan are equal teams in terms of computer rankings. The tie-breaker, then, was the speculation of coaches and sports reporters, which rated Florida over Michigan by only 1%. Is this really fair?

So why haven’t things changed? Because the big schools favored by the BCS system—and determined to continue making as much money as possible—have fervently resisted change.

If the best team can only be decided by play on the field, it’s time we put money and power aside. It’s time we finally abandon the BCS system.