If there's one thing we learned yesterday in Ann Arbor -- aside from all that stuff about counting chickens before they're hatched -- it's this: college football does not need a playoff system. Playoff proponents mindlessly repeat the same mantra: championships should be decided on the field. What they ignore, however, is that in Divison I-A college football, unlike almost every other team sport in the world, what happens on the field is important every week, not just in the waning days of the season.
Like most Michigan fans, I knew the Wolverines were playing on Saturday, but I couldn't have told you which lamb had been chosen for the slaughter in the Big House. It hardly mattered; the truly important games wouldn't start for at least a month. But under the current BCS system, every game is important.
And so when the Stanford/UCLA game was interrupted with the news of Appalachian State's 34-32 defeat of Michigan, I was absolutely stunned. I don't think I thought about the magnitude of the upset at first (the general consensus seems to be that if this isn't the biggest upset in the history of college football, it's pretty close), but I was immediately aware of one thing. Over the course of four hours on the first Saturday of September, an entire season had disintegrated.
Michigan had entered the game with a lofty ranking in the polls and a soft schedule which didn't seem to offer any challenges until the late November matchup with Ohio State. Their goal was no less than a trip to New Orleans for the BCS Championship game, but now all that has changed.
Instead of trying to keep his team from looking ahead as they roll from one victory to the next, coach Lloyd Carr will spend the next week trying to molify alumni who are already angry about recent failures against Ohio State, dodging pointed questions from media who smell blood in the water, and hoping to refocus a team led by a core of seniors who came back to Michigan to win a national championship which is now an impossible dream.
So the Appalachian State victory would be a huge story even if viewed on its own. But if there were a playoff system, the Wolverines coud rest easy, knowing that they could still win their way into the bracket and compete for their championship. The loss would be embarrassing, but it could arguably have no effect on their season. (In fact, a loss like that coud even give a team the motivation necessary to plow through the rest of its schedule.) But the BCS system gives the game added significance and vaults its importance into the stratosphere.
So the next time someone tells you that college football needs a playoff system, just tell him that there already is one. Round one was yesterday, and the Wolverines have been eliminated.
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