Written by Jesse Lamovsky

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In the cases of most sports, be it the NFL, NBA, NHL, Major-League Baseball or college basketball, the postseason showcases the sport at its finest- its best teams and players raising their games under the glare of the championship spotlight. (We won’t mention last season’s horrific NCAA basketball title game.) Sometimes the postseason is practically the only reason to watch a certain sport at all. You can all but skip an NBA, NHL or college basketball season, tune in to the tournament and not miss a whole lot altogether.

Not so college football, and the sport’s latest postseason showcased only the bankruptcy of the bowl system. Far from the game at its best, the 2011-12 bowls showcased mediocre teams, questionable coaching and officiating, futility on both sides of the ball- from the 777 yards given up by Washington’s defense in the Alamo Bowl to the 84 yards gained by LSU’s offense in the BCS Championship Game- sparse crowds and poor television ratings. Alabama’s title-game win was the lowest-rated since the BCS began in 1998.

Something has to give. The system is broken. Regardless of the dominance of Alabama’s performance in the title game, we’ve just had a season without anything resembling a National Championship. Impressive as it was, the Tide’s 21-0 shutout of LSU in New Orleans only tied the season series between the teams. The anti-climax of the BCS title, the emptiness of the bowls in general- it just isn’t working. The whole system needs a shakeup. And it’s almost certain it will be shaken up when the new contract begins in 2014.

With that in mind, here are some suggestions for the folks making these decisions, along with a word on the departed Joe Paterno:

Cut Down on the Number of Bowls: There were 35 bowl games played following the 2011 season. There were 120 schools playing FBS football during the 2011 season. 58 percent of FBS teams received bowl bids which are intended- or at least should be intended- as a reward for a successful season. And if you define success in terms of winning, it’s almost impossible for more than half the teams in any league to be successful.  

By contrast, only about a fifth of Division I basketball schools receive NCAA Tournament bids, even after the recent expansion to 68 teams.

When more than half the teams in the FBS are getting bowl bids, you’re bound to get a subpar product. There just aren’t that many quality teams. You end up with absurdities like the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl between a 6-7 UCLA team that had just fired its coach and a 6-6 Illinois team that had lost six in a row and had just fired its coach. People don’t want to buy that sort of product, and it showed in acres of empty seats in host stadiums around the country.

Cut the number of bowls down to twenty. That means 33 percent of FBS schools will get bids. Fewer teams mean better matchups, and better matchups mean more people watching and (presumably) attending. It just makes for a superior product. And it gets the bowls back to what they were meant to be in the first place- a reward for a successful season- instead of a consolation prize for mediocrity, which many of them are now. Which neatly segues into my next proposal:

Make Bowl Bids Conditional on Won/Loss Record: Of the seventy teams that played in bowls in 2011-12, fourteen came into their games with a record of 6-6 or worse. That means a full one-fifth of postseason participants didn’t have a winning record during the regular season. Of those fourteen, only two- Marshall in the St. Petersburg Bowl and Purdue in the Little Caesar’s Bowl- defeated opponents that came in with winning records; and those victories were over teams from the Sun Belt and Mid-American Conferences, respectively.

There’s a gulf between a winning team- even one with a 7-5 record- and a non-winning team- even one with a 6-6 record. The former is generally crisper, sharper, more focused, more motivated; the latter is generally sloppy, inconsistent, unfocused and, in the case of teams with lame-duck or interim coaches, in the throes of off-the-field upheaval. More often than not the winning team will give a superior performance in a bowl game because it has more to play for. The non-winning team is often simply playing out the string.

Aside from that, there’s again the reward factor. A bowl game should be a reward for a successful season; a winning season. A team that can’t win more than it loses during the regular season has done nothing to deserve a trip to the postseason. Ohio State finished 6-6 with a losing record in its conference and lost its last three games. Did the Buckeyes really deserve a bowl trip based on that resume? No, they didn’t- and they showed why in their sorry Gator Bowl performance against a Florida team that didn’t deserve a bid either, for that matter.

We see enough mediocrity during the regular season. We shouldn’t be subjected to it during the bowl season. Reserve the honor of a bowl berth for winning teams, and let the losers stay home where they belong.  

Make BCS Bids Conditional on Top 10 BCS Standing: Four of the ten automatic BCS bids went to teams that finished outside the top ten in the regular-season rankings- Virginia Tech (#11), Michigan (#13), Clemson (#15) and West Virginia (#23). Three teams in the top ten- Arkansas (#6), Boise State (#7) and Kansas State (#8) were shut out. As it turned out, the Sugar Bowl between the Hokies and Wolverines was a better game than the Cotton Bowl between the Hogs and Wildcats. But you can’t count on a great finish; you create the best matchup possible.

(By the way, the no-catch call on Danny Coale’s sensational Sugar Bowl overtime touchdown grab gets my vote as Worst Single Officiating ****-Up of the 2011-12 Bowl Season. That kid brought the ball in (one-handed), he controlled it all the way, he made that catch clean and the call on the field was a catch. Watch this and you tell me- how the call on the field can be overturned? Danny Coale got robbed and so did the Hokies, especially since they basically lost the game on that play.)

Anyway, this means doing away with automatic BCS bids for conference champions. Now, this usually won’t be an issue for the Big Ten, whose champion should usually be a top-ten team. Nor will it be an issue for God’s Conference, the Pac-12 or Big 12. The arrangement screws the present incarnations of the ACC and Big East- but that’s okay, because it’s intended to. With Miami and Florida State in the wilderness the former isn’t a power conference, and as for the Big East… well, the less said the better.   

Automatic BCS Bids for Top 10 BCS Standing: Here’s a clause to make the non-AQ schools happy, along with BCS schools that presently don’t qualify under the present two-team-per-conference limit. Wouldn’t matter if a team is the best in the Mountain West Conference or the third-best in God’s Conference- as long as they’re in the top 10 of the BCS standings at the end of the regular season, they automatically qualify for a BCS bowl game- thus avoiding travesties like Boise State playing a pre-Christmas bowl against a .500 Arizona State team.

The idea is to create the best matchup. Two of the problems with the BCS are that, a.) by tying the National Championship into one game and , it’s taken truly meaningful implications out of the other bowls and b.) by tethering itself to the ACC and Big East it fills spots with teams that have no business playing in a prestigious bowl. Placing BCS Top-10 status ahead of conference affiliation remedies both of these defects.

I’m admittedly a little reluctant to bend on the two-team-per-conference limit. For the most part there aren’t more than two BCS-worthy teams in a conference. Even in this season’s edition of God’s Conference Arkansas was a dubious Number Three; the Hogs played two teams with a pulse during the regular season and got hammered by both of them. But there are years when the third-place team in a power conference is better than the best team in the Big East or ACC, and the BCS should be flexible enough to adapt in such years.

Semifinals Added to Championship Selection: If they won’t give us a Tournament, maybe we can get one by the back door. And that may well happen, as a plus-one is being seriously considered by the conference commissioners as well as Notre Dame. Not only does a plus-one get us closer to an actual Tournament, it distributes national-championship implications over more than one bowl, involving more games, more teams, more fans and more interest in the process. And there usually aren’t more than three or four legitimate title contenders in a given year anyway, so the chances of an aggrieved party are pretty small.

While I know there is zero chance of this happening, I would play the BCS Semifinals on Christmas weekend and the Championship Game on New Year’s Day. I’ve never been a big fan of holding the title game in the second week of January; to me it’s a case of the sport overstaying its welcome. The traditional end of the college football season is January 1, and that’s how it should be even with a plus-one.

That’s not how it will be, though. In all likelihood two semifinal games would be played on New Year’s Day at rotating BCS sites with the Championship Game played the following week. It isn’t the ideal fix, but under the present circumstances it’s probably the best we can hope for. At the very least it’s another small step toward giving college football what pretty much every other sport already has- a postseason that’s worthy of the game itself.

A Quick Word on Joe Pa: Three months ago Joe Paterno was a living legend in his forty-sixth season as head football coach at Penn State University. Now, he’s dead. Paterno passed away Sunday morning at the age of 85. I’m just going to guess that it wasn’t simply the cancer that killed him. Bear Bryant died less than a month after coaching his final game at Alabama; Paterno didn’t last much longer. This shouldn’t be a surprise and it isn’t.

I’ll leave the chest-thumping for others. Joe Pa will be judged by someone far larger and more powerful than me. Nor will I pontificate on judging him by the entirety of what he did at Penn State, aside from the way his tenure ended. Paterno’s legacy can never be separated from what transpired with Jerry Sandusky, nor should it be.

One thing I can say is that I’ve never seen a bigger, quicker fall from grace- and I’m not sure anyone else has, either. I was almost a year from being born when Richard Nixon resigned the Presidency- but that can’t possibly be a steeper tumble than this. And considering what we know about Sandusky and his activities, and what we know about what Paterno knew, it was inevitable; it was bound to end this way. It’s just stunning.