Boycott the bowl charade

Each year, I ask the NCAA to give us a real Division I-A college football playoff system. Each year, they ignore my request. This year, however, things have gone from bad to worse. First, Nebraska stunk its way into the national championship game. Then, USA Today reported that at least two bowls are demanding that colleges pay them for the right to play in their bowls.

The Crucial.com Humanitarian Bowl in Boise, Idaho and the Silicon Valley Football Classic in San Jose, California require teams to pay them $550,000 for the right to play in their bowls – $250,000 will pay for tickets and $300,000 will be for "corporate sponsorship." Can you spell s-h-a-k-e d-o-w-n? I don't know how anyone can think this makes sense.

Four years ago, they created the Bowl Championship Series to "guarantee" that we would have a real national championship game. However, it has never given us what they promised. This year, Nebraska, which got its clock cleaned by Colorado, 62-36, was rewarded for losing by 26 points and not winning the conference championship by going to the big dance. How does that make sense?

So instead of playoff where the best teams face each other on the field, we have a buyoff, where those who can generate the most revenue for the bowls get to play. Next week, the University of North Texas, which has a losing record, and Colorado State, which is one game from about .500, will play the first of 25 bowl games. I just can't wait.

In a way, we shouldn't blame Nebraska. They did everything they could to lose the right to play in the national championship game. The real culprit is TCU.

You see, Nebraska beat TCU 21-7 at the beginning of the season. On the last day of the regular season, however, TCU upset Southern Mississippi by two points. That 2-point victory increased Nebraska's strength of schedule ranking from 18th to 14th. This cut .16 points off Nebraska's BCS rating and allowed it to beat out Colorado by .05 points even though Colorado had whipped their tails by 26 points two weeks earlier.

Sadly, this was the season where a playoff system would have made great sense. With so many upsets in the last two weeks, really great teams were cast aside with no meaningful way to redeem their season. However, we don't have a playoff so, once again, the season ends with a thud.

But wait … it gets worse. Hawaii, a solid 9-3 team, which beat then unbeaten BYU 72-45 will stay home while such "great" 6-5 teams as East Carolina, Pittsburgh, USC, Alabama, TCU, Iowa, Kansas State, Clemson and Michigan State go play. Clemson, Fresno State, Louisiana Tech and Michigan State, by the way, were the schools that were so desperate to be in a bowl game that they each paid more than a half-million dollars to play in the two "shake down" bowls.

You know, I might be able to accept this arrangement if it made financial sense. But it doesn't. Forty-three percent of all Division I-A colleges play in a bowl game. That is twice the participation rate of schools that make the NCAA March Madness basketball playoffs. However I-A bowls only pay $156.1 million while the March Madness basketball playoffs pay $545 million a year.

In fact, the bowl system makes so little sense that college presidents turned down an offer from a Swiss sports firm to pay $3,006,000,000 over eight years for the right to sponsor an annual 16-team college football playoff. That's right, they turned down $375.8 million a year so they could make $156 million which is 58.5 percent less!

What I want is the same type of playoff that they have for Division III football. Twenty-eight Division III teams play in a five-round playoff. The top four teams get a bye the first week and then join the 12 victors of the first round games.

Using the USA Today/ESPN Coaches Poll, here's what the first-week games would have been, with Miami, Oregon, Colorado and Nebraska having byes:

Florida vs. Auburn
Maryland vs. Hawaii
Illinois vs. Toledo
Tennessee vs. Marshall
Texas vs. Florida State
Oklahoma vs. Ohio State
Stanford vs. Louisville
LSU vs. Fresno State
Washington State vs. Washington
South Carolina vs. Georgia
Michigan vs. Syracuse
Virginia Tech vs. BYU

If we used this approach, five weeks later, we would finally have a real national championship game.

For those of us who are football fans, the buildup and excitement would be something to behold. The match-ups would be intriguing and, for the first time, the players – not computers – would decide who deserved to be Number One.

It is clear that the NCAA doesn't care about us fans, but we can hit them where it hurts. Already, last year's "meaningless" bowls set a record for low attendance. Let's boycott the bowl charade. Don't watch the Visit Florida Tangerine bowl, the galleryfurniture.com bowl, the Sega Sports Las Vegas bowl, the GMAC bowl, the Mainstay Independence bowl and their meaningless siblings. Because we won't get our playoffs until the bowls' TV ratings fall like bricks to the ground.