Playoffs: unfair and unsportsmanlike

We are well into the college football season yet only a week or two into the annual BCS, Bowl Championship Series, rankings of the highest caliber teams in the top division of the sport. Their purpose is to establish a 'true' national champion within the college football world. Sadly it is, like most systems of playoffs for top honors, much ado about nothing.

To begin with, playoffs really don't prove who is the better team. At the highest levels of play anybody can beat anybody else on any given day, particularly in a short series let alone one game at a time. BCS schemes only make matters worse, by factoring in noncompetitive aspects of the game. If games are to mean anything at all then all we should do is see what happens on the field or in the arena. Strength of schedule, and such as that, are ultimately subjective. They are useless in determining who ought to play who when.

But more than that. Playoffs are inherently unfair to any participant. If the better team wins, so what? They should have won. If the worse team wins, again, so what? On one day and one day only they outplayed a superior rival. It happens; yet when it does, the lesser squad is still the lesser squad, and they gain acclaim beyond their actual ability.

The bottom line is, paraphrasing former Detroit Tigers and Cincinnati Reds manager Sparky Anderson: the best team isn't necessarily the team which wins the World Series. It's the team with the best record after the regular season. This applies to all sports; it is the long haul rather than one series or one game which really lets us see who's the best in their field. Short series only offer false excitement. They do not truly measure the mettle and grit of a team.