NCAA Needs March Madness Style Tournament to Replace BCS in Football

The NCAA tournament is about the only time I pay any attention at all to the sport of Basketball, football is the sport that occupies my interest.

The NCAA basketball tournament is one of the most thrilling events in all of sports where 66 teams come together in a single elimination tournament to decide the national championship. Along the way, there are numerous upsets that are the stuff of legend. It is tough to imagine that very same entity endorses the BCS, which lets a computer decide two teams to play in a championship game. This creates a system that lacks the compelling drama of the basketball tournament, and is better at creating controversy and discussions about what is wrong with it.

It would seem like the NCAA would see the rapt attention their basketball tournament gets every year and want to bring some of that type of energy to the football side. Some may counter that football has the Bowl Games. Outside of the top few bowl games, most of them are snooze fests that don't mean much except to the schools playing in them. In the BCS only one game truly matters for the championship.

If they were to take the top 16 in football and put them in a seeded bracket, there wouldn't be undefeated teams like Boise State and TCU passed over for a one win team because of the set up of the system. As it stands, there is always more talk about what is wrong with the BCS and the teams left out than the actual results of the championship game.

If the basketball championship was decided by the BCS standards, the only meaningful post season would have consisted of Kansas and Kentucky playing for the championship. Instead, Kansas was upset by Northern Iowa in the second round, thus ending their season despite their being ranked number one at the end of the regular season. In this scenario nobody would care about the St Mary's (California) Gaels who made national headlines by upsetting traditional powerhouse Villanova.

The NCAA makes the argument that adoption a playoff format or tournament for football would 'reduce the value of the regular season.' However, this is a slap in the face for team like Boise State and TCU who both went undefeated in the regular season, but didn't get to play for the championship. When viewed against the spectacular success of March Madness in basketball, it becomes even of a head-scratcher why they don't have a "December Doomsday" where they play the first two rounds of a football tournament between Thanksgiving and Christmas and have the semi-finals on New Year's Day and the finals in prime time a week later. The first two rounds would consist of home-field advantage for the higher seeds. The semi-finals and finals could be held on a rotating basis among the sites of the traditional major bowls, or those games could be subject to a bidding process like the NFL does with the Super Bowl.

If the current bowls wanted to continue to exist, they could do so with the best teams that don't make the tournament. This would make them completely analogous to the NIT in basketball.

It is way past time that the NCAA applies the lessons they learned in creating March Madness and applied them to football.