The 2014 college football season, which officially got underway last week, will be the first season in the post-BCS era, an era marred by drama, controversy and never-ending headaches. Instead of a national title game decided by biased voters, faulty computer algorithms and conference elitism, it will now be decided by a four-team playoff that will take place during the normal bowl season schedule. But here’s the real problem with this new and “improved” college football postseason: the top four teams will be selected in a very similar manner to the way the top two teams were selected in the BCS era.
This means that instead of the No. 3-ranked team feeling cheated and left-out come December, it will be the No. 5-ranked team relegated to an inconsequential bowl game that will probably be played on a Thursday night in Orlando to a television audience of 40 people (kidding, of course). But this four-team playoff, while a definite step up from the nightmare that was the BCS, seems more like a temporary patch than a permanent solution, chiefly because it doesn’t really address the true problem with the college football postseason – namely, the difficulty of objectively ranking teams from vastly different conferences with different levels of competition and different pedigrees.
