This weekend (if you haven't been clued in by the endless talking about it on TV and ever-growing number of features on every angle possible) No.1 LSU will travel to Tuscaloosa to take on No.2 Alabama in college football's biggest game of the year.
That first paragraph is not meant to belittle the game. It is a huge game. The winner will be heavily favored to win the national championship. But this game has taken on more attention than I can ever remember a college football game getting. There have been plenty of No.1 vs. No.2 matchups in the regular season before, but this one somehow seems bigger. The last 1 vs. 2 was between Ohio State and Michigan, and received a great deal of attention mainly because of the fact that it was the biggest rivalry of the year for both teams, with a shot at the title game on the line. This game between Bama and LSU feels somehow different. Yes, a shot at the title game is still on the line (though not guaranteed, like it was in the OSU-Michigan game because that was the final game of the year). This game is receiving extra attention because it is coming at the perfect time. It is a matchup of two SEC schools in the height of the "SEC is the only football conference that matters" era of college football.
History tells us that we've got a good shot a good game between the two teams. I hope it will be a good game, but I will have the nagging thought in my head about how this game will spell the end of the season for one of the (supposedly) best two teams in college football.
The BCS is designed to have the best two teams in the nation play. It doesn't want a playoff, because that allows for upsets to happen, and then the system does not get its optimal national championship matchup. Believe it or not, in the BCS' 13 years, it has gotten the two contenders right more often than not. But this year, it is almost impossible for that to happen.
According to every unbiased source, the BCS' current Nos. 1 and 2 (LSU and Bama) are the best two teams in the country. The problem is, they are playing each other this weekend and are both in the same division of the SEC. That means only one of them (the winner of Saturday's game in all likelihood) can play in the SEC championship game. A team with one loss that doesn't even make it to its conference championship game cannot possibly be selected to play in the national championship, right? And despite how annoying it will be when all the SEC fans are pining for the loser of this game to be given another shot, this year, they'll be right.
Which brings us to the even bigger problem. According to the BCS, LSU is the best team, the most deserving of playing in a national championship game right now. But to do so, they have to beat Alabama in Alabama this week. Home-field advantage is approximately 70-times more important in college sports than pro sports. In a game between the nation's two best teams, which seem pretty evenly matched, how is it fair for the site of the game to help decide the winner (and then the likely eventual national champion)?
It's not fair at all to do this in college football, a sport where the great teams switch from year to year (look at Auburn and Oregon this year: not bad by any stretch, but nowhere near national champion caliber. That's just how it works). When LSU has its chance to win a national title (it probably will not be this good next year), the school is given a significant disadvantage to winning that title because of a road game on the schedule. It doesn't make any sense.
Unfortunately, there isn't a good solution to this problem. The only solution is to extend the season and have teams play home-and-aways with all the teams in their conference divisions. But I don't like that at all. Really, the best solution is the one just about everybody has wanted all along: a playoff. The loser of Saturday's game will almost certainly still finish in the top four or eight teams in the country by season's end, and in a world with an FBS playoff, they would be given another shot at the title. A shot they deserve, because the only mistake they made was deciding to be great in a year when a team from the same division decided to be great as well.
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