THE MALCOM X-FACTOR: BCS Still Better Than Ivy League

We’ve heard all the complaints by now. You know which ones I’m talking about.

All the talk of how Michigan got a raw deal when the indefinable Bowl Championship Series formula decided to put one-loss Florida in the title game to play for the right to get blown out by Ohio State in January. It was the Wolverines, as you’ll remember, whose only loss was to that undefeated No. 1 Buckeye squad, a three-point road defeat three weeks ago in Columbus. And the Gators struggled mightily in their conquering of the SEC—the most overrated and over-hyped conference in college football.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I’m happy with the BCS national championship result this year. You see, for some mindless, indescribable reason, I’ve been a big Florida fan the last three years. I’m not from there, I have no family there, and my travels to the state consist mostly of a few trips to Disney World. Still, my last three preseason title picks? Gators, Gators, Gators.

I hate the BCS as a whole as much as the next guy, but that’s not the source of most of my angst regarding stupid rules in the college football world. In addition to finally giving my boys from Florida some love, there’s one thing that the BCS actually did right this year—something that it gets right every year.

It’s not the Ivy League.

A common complaint from the Michigan faithful is that thanks to the lack of uniformity among how conferences determine their winners, the Wolverines were shafted. After all, the SEC, the Big 12 and the ACC have two divisions with two winners, which meet at season’s end to decide who has a chance to play in a coveted BCS bowl game.

Boy, that’s terrible. I’d hate to go to a school like Michigan, where their football games are home to more than 100,000 fans, where every home game is like the Harvard-Yale weekend we see only twice during our entire college careers.

We might do a lot of stuff right, but when it comes to football for the Crimson and the rest of the Ivy League, we’re struggling, at best. It’s bad enough that we have no conference tournament to speak of, but it’s far worse that even if we did, thanks to a terribly antiquated Ivy League rule that began when the league officially formed fifty years ago, we’re not allowed to play past the regular season. I guess I don’t feel too sorry that Michigan has one loss and might only finish, oh, I don’t know, second in the final standings.

I know what the next gripe is, too. There needs to be a discernable way to separate similarly-talented one-loss teams. In short, the BCS is in need of a better tie-breaker.

Everyone in Ann Arbor, listen up. You want to know what we use as a tiebreaker in this so-called league? Oh, that’s right. When two teams are tied in Ivy play, we revert to the elementary teachings taught to us in grade school. We share.

Sorry, Princeton. Sorry that you have one overall loss compared to two for Yale. Sorry that you actually beat Yale, the only team in the Ivy League to do so. But most importantly, sorry that—because you play in the Ivy League—you’re forced to share your championship with the Bulldogs this season.

Yeah, the BCS is garbage. Even New Jersey-based Rutgers, a school few even knew had a football team, played their way out of a BCS bowl in favor of the first-ever Texas Bowl (good move guys, even if it will never, ever seem like it).

But however bad the BCS is, the Ivy League is far worse. Michigan fans: when you’re watching Ohio State play Florida a week after New Year’s for college football’s biggest prize, no matter how much you think it should have been a Buckeye-Wolverine rematch, be grateful.

Give thanks because you’re able to watch a game between teams with 12 or 13 wins (we play exactly ten up here), after New Year’s (our football season is over before Thanksgiving, every year), among teams that had a chance to play for a championship (Division I-AA has a great playoff system that we will never taste).

All this in regards to football and you also have the excitement that is the NCAA basketball tournament to look forward to. Sure, the Ivy League sends its own annual rep to the Big Dance, but let’s be honest: We’re not going to play any fourteen-game stretch better than Penn or Princeton, so the regular season title is out of the question. And as the sole Division I conference without a conference tournament to conclude our basketball season, our dream of getting blown out by a college basketball powerhouse is dashed.

For the Crimson and its seven sisters, it’s something that we will never experience.

I know it’s a tough pill to swallow, but here’s a final thought for all the fans at schools who feel like they’ve ever been screwed in some way by the BCS: just be happy that you’re not us.

Oh, and go Gators!

—Staff writer Malcom A. Glenn can be reached at mglenn@fas.harvard.edu.