Soon, our long national nightmare with the Bowl Championship Series will be over.
After the 2013 college football season, the BCS will be but a bitter memory.
Then the new national nightmare can begin ? the four-team national championship playoff system.
Those of us who have railed against the BCS are supposed to be thrilled. A playoff system! At long last, reason and sanity have prevailed!
But the emperor has no clothes. This is nothing more than an expansion of the BCS system with a selection committee replacing the convoluted, nonsensical polls and computer ranking methods.
"A four-team playoff doesn't go too far," said Virginia Tech president Charles W. Steger. "It goes just the right amount."
With all due respect to Steger and his colleagues who approved the new system, a four-team playoff doesn't go nearly far enough.
Four teams? OK. Who do you like after the two Southeastern Conference teams destined to be selected each year?
Consider this scenario in 2014 or beyond. Injuries to key players cost Virginia Tech and Virginia consecutive losses to Duke and Maryland.
The key players return. Virginia Tech and Virginia get so hot they obviously belong among the top four teams in the country. But with two bad losses, the selection committee ranks the Hokies and Cavaliers seventh and eighth.
Bye-bye national championship dreams.
Still think a four-team field is the answer?
Of course it isn't. At least eight teams should be included.
The new system, with its selection committee, has been compared to the men's NCAA basketball tournament. But there is a huge difference. In college basketball, underdogs have a chance, as shown by George Mason, Butler and VCU.
In this new football playoff world, four elite teams will be selected, and we know such programs as Boise State, Brigham Young and Houston rarely, if ever, will be among them.
But if Nebraska runs the table in a watered-down Big Ten, hello Cornhuskers in a national semifinal game.
The playoff games will not begin until Dec. 31 or Jan. 1 of each year, leaving the monthlong layoff between the end of the regular season and postseason in place.
No other sport at any level operates with this kind of rust-inducing gap. And please don't mention encroachment on academic commitments and exams as the reason. Don't mention bowl games, either.
College athletics ceded academic integrity arguments when football and basketball teams began playing on almost every night of the week. College baseball teams play 50 to 60 games in three months, costing these student-athletes countless hours of class and study time.
Academic issues seem to matter for football teams only in December and January, when classes aren't even held for at least half those months.
Bowl games have lost importance ever since the BCS title game was created. Even with this faux playoff system, the significance of bowl games will continue to decline.
Unless the college presidents come to their senses before a television deal is cut, we will be stuck with this new albatross for 12 years. Any effort to expand the field will be met with the usual obstinate arguments by coaches, who will claim the four-team symmetry is perfect.
In a way, they will be correct. It does a perfect job of keeping championships, power and money among a select few.
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