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Obama Playing Fantasy Football

By Jeffrey Standen

President-elect Obama has recently added his presidential-elect voice to the chorus calling for the demise of the BCS college football championship. The primary reason for eliminating the BCS and instituting a playoff for the top level of college football is the desire to crown a "true champion." Some people also express concern over the fact that the BCS system limits eligibility to champions from certain conferences, plus (as of recently) a possible at-large bid for other teams. In short, the BCS smacks of the elitism of a select private club: eligibility limited members only. No wonder populist politicians rail against it.

And what is the position of one obscure professor of law? (The internet waits for the answer.) It's this: the BCS is not a bad way to determine a national champion. Nor is a playoff. Nor is a popularity poll. We could throw dice for that matter. The point is, there is no way to determine a national college football champion. Not even a single plausible way. Just a lot of bad ways. And there's a good argument that the BCS (or something along its lines) is the best of the bad ways to determine a champion. So when football coaches and other world leaders complain about the BCS, they might as well complain about the weather while they're at it. It's out of our control.

1. Of course the model for the ideal college sports playoff system is the NCAA's annual gamblers' extravaganza, March Madness. The tournament is a lot of fun (and also puts about one-half of the American population in violation of the federal Wager Wire Act), but no one really believes its "champion" is anything more than a mythical champion. Some of the best teams in the country get eliminated far short of the final four on fluke shots, crazy bounces and bad calls. The surviving team is no more the best team in college than is the champion of the World Series of Poker or the winner of the Super Bowl (especially last year). The Patriots were the best team in football last year, winning seventeen of eighteen games. I'm not begrudging the Giants their trophy: they won by the rules in place. But let's not trick ourselves into thinking that trophy makes them the best team for the year, any more than the Patriots were the best team in 2001 when the upset the heavily favored (and better) St. Louis Rams. These are tournaments. They crown tournament champions, not "true champions" except by coincidence. So if it's a "true champion" you want, a tournament's not the obvious choice.

2. One other little problem comes to play in tournaments: who wins is to some extent the product of initial seedings. Assume four college football teams: Team A has a strong running game, Team B has a strong passing game, Team C has weak run defense but a strong pass defense, and Team D has a great run defense but a poor passing defense. Assume all other team strengths are equal. If the four-team tournament is seeded A v. C and B v. D in the first round, then we would expect a championship game pitting A v. B. If the first round is A v. D and B v. C, then the title contest would be C v. D. Same teams, different champions, all depending on the initial seedings. Or, what if Team E is better than Team F, and F is better than Team G, but G (for whatever matchup reason) can beat E? (And by the way, we see this all the time in college football, where Oregon State beats USC, then USC beats Stanford, then Stanford beats Oregon State: which is the best team based on game results?) We'd cycle around forever, with E beating F, F beating G, and G beating E forever, or at least until an upset happened and we could pretend one of these teams is "the champion." The point here is, it's very hard when dealing with more than one candidate to ever arrive at a "true" sense of who the best one is. (Hey, I should win a Nobel Prize for this! Wait, I think someone already did.)

3. A tournament would be fun and produce some wild betting, so for sure I'm for it. But I don't think a national political leader would want to put it quite that way. Maybe the fun of it all is justification enough (although we'd probably kill the players with all these games). But the "true champion" thing does not pass even basic sense. Plus, how is the BCS, which (with some arbitrariness) designates a single one of its four bowl games "the national championship game" any better? Isn't it obviously a joke to designate a game as the championship one and expect the rest of us to go along?

4. But there is some plausibility to the BCS' claim to crown a national champion. First, by limiting BCS eligibility to schools from certain top conferences (and Notre Dame, which stinks but has its own television contract), the BCS eliminates to some degree the "fluke elimination" that renders the NCAA basketball tournament (and the World Series of Poker) so obviously susceptible to random luck. Second, by relying in part on opinion polls and game results, the BCS makes an earnest attempt to identify the best teams in the nation. Now I'm not for a minute kidding myself into thinking that the two teams selected to participate in the final game are necessarily the best two, but I think the better case could be made for the proposition that they are more likely to be the best two teams than would be the two teams that survived some single-elimination tournament. Even if the selectors are in error, the odds are even higher that at least one of the teams selected to play in the national championship game was the "right" one, thus ensuring the crowning of the best team in the country as champion. If your interest is in identifying the very best team, then we must be exclusive, precluding eligibility for those teams whose only shot at a title would be to win by a fluke. Members only.

5. Although I could be talked out of this, I don't agree with those commentators who have suggested that the BCS constitutes an antitrust violation. The BCS is a private organization (much as is the NCAA) that is separate from the NCAA and that came about by a joint agreement of its member conferences (and Notre Dame, which stinks but has its own television contract) and certain bowl games. That the BCS people claim its champion is the finest in all the land seems mere hubris: that the rest of us go along with the claim in part shows its plausibility, in part shows its marketing, and in last part shows our gullibility. The excluded schools could of course form their own little club and crown their national champion. Although in the short term this claim would appear foolish, over time it could become plausible as some super-team from a non-BCS conference could have a dominant season (go Boise State!). We could have multiple national champions, just like in professional boxing. In other words, the excluded schools can compete in the market, and so appear unlikely to win an antitrust suit.

6. If we really cared about identifying the best team in college football, we'd scheme a way to have the better teams play each other, as often as possible, and hand the trophy to the team with the best overall record. The more trials, the better the evidence. But college teams play in conferences scattered all over the country, and play strong opponents outside their conference as infrequently as they can (except Notre Dame, which stinks but does have that television contract). So any national champion in football, under any system, will be the product of guesswork or worse. It's always been called "the mythical national championship" for good reason. It still a myth.

Full post as published by The Sports Law Professor on November 23, 2008 (boomark / email).