Bowling The Perfect Game
...the NCAA holds its March Madness Basketball Tournament. Sixty-four teams square off against one another in a 3 week battle to be the best. It is one of the most popular athletic events in the United States, second only to the Super Bowl (Villano, 2007). People stream into Las Vegas casinos, local sports bars, and friends’ homes to watch their teams battle it out on the court. In the end, there is a clear champion crowned. A team which has battled through six games to come out on top of all the rest. There is no debate about who the true champion is. It is clear because it was proven on the court. The same can not be said for every other major college sport. All of them have some sort of a playoff system at the end of the season, except for one. And it happens to be the most popular of all college sports, football (Harris Interactive, 2005). My goal is to explain why this needs to change and how it should be done.
In 1936, the Associated Press began asking a number of sports writers who they thought the best college football teams were. These votes were counted on a weekly basis and at the end of the season an unofficial champion was crowned (Bara, 2003). It did not matter what the team’s win-loss record was or who they played. All that mattered was that the writers for the Associated Press thought you were good. In 1950, United Press International began asking the coaches of college football teams who the best football team was (Bara, 2003). This was done in much the same way as the Associated Press poll and it had the same drawbacks. These polls were initially taken before the bowl games. The bowl games are a series of games that are held after the regular season. They never mattered much in the beginning. They were not meant to crown a champion, they were simply games awarded to some of the better teams at the end of the season as a reward. It
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