The debate of BCS versus playoffs

By Bud Withers | Seattle Times • Published November 07, 2008

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We can perform gene therapy. We can perfect elaborate microprocessors.

We just haven’t figured out a way to separate Alabama, Penn State and Texas Tech.

As you might have surmised, this is your regularly scheduled treatise on progress toward a national college big-boy football playoff, otherwise known as Things That Move More Slowly Than The Mendenhall Glacier.

This week, everybody weighed in on the BCS, from USC coach Pete Carroll ("It stinks") to president-elect Barack Obama, who said he’d like to see an eight-team playoff.

"I happen to be one," insists University of Washington president Mark Emmert, "that thinks it’s inevitable we’ll have a playoff."

Maybe, but it’s questionable whether that happens in the lifetime of Emmert’s grandkids.

If you’re into the debate of BCS versus playoffs, today is a small benchmark. Fox Sports, which has the TV contract to broadcast the BCS games through next season, has until today to submit its exclusive bid for the next four-year period (through the 2013 regular season) that the BCS fathers agreed on last spring.

Given the economy, maybe that bid doesn’t blast the socks off the BCS wonks. And maybe somebody with the bankroll of Warren Buffett comes along and says, "Isn’t it time ... ?"

Until then, it’s a given that the BCS format is in place another five years, at least. The guess here is, it’s going to take something cataclysmic, like an enterprising Middle Eastern oil sheik, to move the BCS unrest to a playoff.

Funny, but it’s money that has helped back the controversy into the corner. It was money, in the form of the conference expansions of the 1990s, that drove the extra league-championship games. And it was money that motivated the NCAA to approve a 12th game.

The season stretched longer, the game got bigger, and presidents got gun-shy about the ramifications of a college football season on steroids (figuratively, of course).

Your garden slugs are thus moving faster than the playoff debate. This week, in a conversation with retiring Pac-10 commissioner Tom Hansen, I advanced every notion from the popular plus-one proposal to a 16-team pigskin-palooza, and he artfully gunned every one down like he was shooting skeet.