Championship Game?

I've been waiting to respond to Ksox's BCS rant until after the so-called BCS championship game. It was an event only rivaled by the Super Bowl for sheer, over-hyped, made for television blech. My response to the BCS question is simple: bag it and go back to the no-real-champion glory days of yesterday.

College football was once the second most followed event in America, only baseball in its heyday had greater popularity. From before the roaring 20's until the mid-60's, it was college football, not the NFL, that defined fall sport in America. The Army / Navy game was, for almost 40 years, the most anticipated sporting event in the country. School kids could name the Fighting Irish's third-string punter, let alone the four horsemen.

What made College football unique was the experience, not the games themselves. Who didn't want to wear a raccoon coat and take the train up to New Haven for Harvard / Yale? Minnesota winning conference championships? Wow!

College footballs shining moment was always New Year's day. National bragging rights were up for grabs, as any combination of wins and loses may knock the front-runner off their post and allow a dark horse to emerge. It was the drama and "who knows?" quality of the bowl games that gave them their mystique, something the NCAA longed to reproduce in basketball through years of "what, UCLA again?" and finally found with the expanded March Madness of the last 20 years.

The BCS, coupled with the emergence of conference championship games, are leading the NCAA down the same path traveled in the television era by Major League Baseball, the NFL, NBA, NHL, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseum. By all means let's make the college season even longer, since playoffs in June have worked so well for the NBA and NHL. Baseball has less than half the followers today as it did when MLB played 140 or so games with 16 teams. Don't agree? Quick, who won the series this year?

This "saturation factor" threatens both NCAA basketball and football, but will cause the most harm in football, turning it into just another cable T.V. sport. My dad saw his only Rose Bowl in 1935 and remembers minute details of the event like it was yesterday, even though he has no idea anymore which teams even played. It was being there that mattered, it was an event national in scope and nearly unrivaled in its glory. Television brought the excitement of being there into our homes, high-def and all. We can't allow t.v's lure of riches to turn this national day of sport into yet another American homogeneous, back-after-these-messages, ad-fest. Despite all the problems of big-money college football, it's still our American sport, mostly played by kids enjoying their only moment of fame.

It is this every-man quality of New Year's day bowl games that makes college football unique, not a playoff trophy to be handed out some time near the end of January, right before the six-day Super Bowl pre-game show begins on ESPN . .