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Death to the BCS: The Definitive Case Against the Bowl Championship Series Hardcover – Bargain Price, October 14, 2010

by Dan Wetzel (Author), Josh Peter (Author), Jeff Passan (Author)

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A team of award-winning sports reporters takes down the Great Satan of college sports: the Bowl Championship Series.

Every college sport picks its champion by a postseason tournament, except for one: Division I-A football. Instead of a tournament, fans are subjected to the Bowl Championship Series, an arcane mix of polling and mathematical rankings that results in just two teams playing for the championship. It is, without a doubt, the most hated institution in all of sports. A recent Sports Illustrated poll found that more than 90 percent of sports fans oppose the BCS, yet this system has remained in place for more than a decade. Built upon top-notch investigative reporting, Death to the BCS at last reveals the truth about this monstrous entity and offers a simple solution for fixing it.

Death to the BCS includes findings from interviews with power players, as well as research into federal tax records, Congressional testimony, and private contracts, revealing:

The truth behind the "Cartel"-the anonymous suits who run the BCS and who profit handsomely by protecting it

The flawed math and corruption that determine which teams participate in the national championship

How the system hurts competition by perpetuating "cupcake" schedules

How "mid-major" teams are systematically denied a chance to play for the championship

How a comprehensive sixteen-team playoff plan can solve the problem while enhancing profitability

The first book to lay out the unseemly inner workings of the BCS in full detail, Death to the BCS is a rousing manifesto for bringing fairness back to one of our most beloved sports.

Print length

208 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Gotham
Publication date

October 14, 2010
Dimensions

5.78 x 0.87 x 8.54 inches
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About the Author

Dan Wetzel, Josh Peter, and Jeff Passan write for Yahoo! Sports, the most read sports site on the Web. Wetzel has coauthored four books, including the New York Times bestseller Resilience: Faith, Focus, Triumph with Alonzo Mourning, and lives in Michigan. Peter is an award-winning investigative journalist who has earned national attention for his reporting on the Bowl Championship Series. In 2005, he was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for a series on race and high school football in the South. He lives in Los Angeles. Passan has won multiple Associated Press sports editors awards and lives in Kansas.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B00509CR5W
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Gotham (October 14, 2010)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 208 pages
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.8 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.78 x 0.87 x 8.54 inches

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Great investigative reporting, compelling arguments

Reviewed in the United States on October 23, 2010

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This is a great read for the college football enthusiast who's tired of the BCS, but maybe isn't aware all of the distinct politics behind the most-loathed championship format we have in American sports. Each chapter seeks to drive home a specific angle about why we continue to collectively bemoan an inferior structure and have uncomfortably avoided a tournament-style championship for so long, in lieu of a polling system that in a growing number of documented cases, has failed followers of the sport.

The supporting evidence is well-gathered and organized logically, and likewise presented as such. It's a great, quick, undiluted analysis of the money behind the athletics.

The only knock I might have about the book is that the authors might be too slanted in their arguments. A strong case is made against the BCS and the "Cartel" controlling it, without much consideration from the other side. But then, this might be the point - stating once and for all how non-socialist the state of college football, the grandest game in the land, is and continues to be.

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Fritz R. Ward

Lays Out the Case Against The BCS

Reviewed in the United States on November 2, 2010

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In almost every sport outside of gymnastics and figure skating, players and teams compete on the field. The winner is judged the best. And the sport continues to the next game or contest. Ultimately the top teams play each other and the winner is the champion. But college football is more like gymnastics and less like any other team sport. At the highest level, teams compete for recognition from mostly anonymous judges and various computers (with mostly hidden programs). The "winners" are then invited to immensely profitable bowl games with two dubbed the best in the country, while everyone else tends to lose money. It is a strange system, largely anti-competitive, and it promotes tremendous disagreement every year among fans. This book lays out precisely what is wrong with the BCS, and how it can be changed.

The Bowl Championship Series (BCS) is not an NCAA sanctioned championship. It is in fact a collusion created by the most powerful conferences in college football to monopolize the revenue generated by giant bowl games. The premise of the BCS is that polls and computers decide which teams are the top teams in the nation and the championship game is played among the two selected. Other top teams are admitted to other high paying bowl games. But there is more to this process than meets the eye. Nearly all college football teams are affiliated with one of eleven conferences. Six of these eleven "automatically" qualify for a bid into the big money games. The other five conferences do not. This is an obvious instance of collusion and suggests a violation of anti-trust laws. It is all the more odious because the money for all the schools involved comes largely from the government itself. They are, for the most part, state sponsored institutions and even the private universities still receive government grants, student loans, etc to fund their business.

This situation could be almost forgiven if indeed the teams that came out of these six power conferences were in fact the best teams. As the book reveals, however, they are not always the best and indeed, one of the major purposes of the BCS is to exclude teams who might pose a threat to them, most notably Boise State. A small university in a Pacific Northwest state, Boise State is not what many fans think of when they think, football powerhouse. But Boise has quietly built a program the old fashioned way (winning games) and does so with a budget that is but a fraction of what the schools in major conferences make. So the BCS tries every strategy under the sun to keep Boise out. As early as 2001 Boise was already highly ranked in the computer programs that make up 1/3 of the polls. So the BCS ordered the computer ranking services to discount margin of victory in order to weaken Boise's standing. When the venerable Associated Press (AP) poll refused to play along with the BCS games and withdrew rather than taint their poll for the benefit of big conferences, the BCS created its own poll, the Harris Interactive, made up of largely ignorant voters who simply read the news and pass on the opinions of sportscasters on ESPN. Finally, the BCS maintains the power of its favored conferences by using a coaches poll. The majority of the coaches in the poll are from the same favored conferences and have a financial interest in voting teams from these same conferences higher than those from the non-favored conferences. As a result, teams like Boise State are routinely eliminated from major post season bowl games. This is not for what they have done on the field, but because voters and neutered computer ratings keep them out. With 5 undefeated regular seasons, Boise has only played in two major bowl games.

But the BCS does more than just monopolize revenue and handicap small but successful football programs. It harms the sport in a myriad of ways. The authors of this book note that the BCS encourages teams in the major conferences to play weak schedules out of conference. It increases the number of teams playing against lower division football opponents. It decreases the number of marquee games in a season. In short, the BCS hurts football as a competitive sport. And it does not have to be this way. The authors provide readers with an exciting alternative: a workable playoff system that can actually determine champions on the field, increase revenue for all colleges, and promote sportsmanship. Unfortunately, getting those with the power to give it up might ultimately (and literally) take an act of congress. Many are loath to bring politics into college football, but given that state institutions of higher learning are the ones behaving in such an anti-competitive way as to make the typical robber-baron blush, perhaps that is what is needed.

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DACHokie

Playoffs ... here we come?

Reviewed in the United States on February 14, 2011

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If you are a fan of college football, more than likely you have an opinion regarding the basis the Division I teams determine its national champion ... either you like the poll and bowl system that is currently in place or you desire a playoff of some sort. Personally, I've always enjoyed the current system (as wacky and unreliable as it is) partly because of tradition, but mostly because I thought the current system was favorable for my alma mater. Then, while listening to a sports talk show while riding to work, I heard an interview with one the authors of "Death to the BCS" and thought it more than fair to challenge the current system. The author hammered out a litany of common-sense-oriented arguments that seemed so difficult to refute I found myself questioning my own support for the BCS system ... needless to say, I ordered the book as soon as I got to work.

"Death to the BCS" does more than just rail against the current bowl system and suggest a playoff as being the only solution ... that would be too easy. The authors effectively chose to get the reader angry and bitter at the current bowl system before making their alternative pitch, and follow that pitch with further assaults on the bowls and those who reap the huge financial windfall they annually provide. In my opinion, nothing works better at getting someone to change his point-of-view on an issue than to convince him into believing his current position on the issue is stupid. That is the formula for this book: expose the reader to the dirty secrets of the BCS in order to generate enough outrage that the reader will except nothing less than a complete overhaul of the current system ... it is at this point, the authors slide you their playoff alternative. Even better, they offer a playoff alternative that doesn't eliminate the purpose of the existing bowl games ... an idea that may resonate with those diehard traditionalists enamored with the current system.

What makes "Death to the BCS"'s argument succeed, in my opinion, is the information they provide on the inner-workings of the BCS. The authors have done their research. I found the results of their research to be somewhat shocking ... not that greed was the core of the problem, but more so the shallowness of that greed. Brought before the US Senate on hearing to defend the fairness of the system and the financial windfall that seems to only benefit the bowl executives, the BSC had the gall to claim itself a charitable organization that contributes "up to" 25% of its profits to various charities (remember that the phrase "up to" can include 0%). How shallow is the greed? The authors point out the chump change the Sugar Bowl has contributed to city of New Orleans in the years since Hurricane Katrina ... the cumulative contribution looked like it came from a kid's lemonade stand, not the annual multi-million dollar cash cow the Sugar Bowl truly is. Then, there is the financial bloodbath almost all universities suffer every year by sending teams to bowls ... unfortunately, my alma mater, Virginia Tech, was the example used to illustrate the extent of the gouging. The so-called payouts that often range in the millions generally don't make a dent in the universities' bowl expenses. Yes, the authors do point out the benefits bowls provide schools in terms of exposure, but paint a picture of bowl execs laughing while thumbing through their stacks of cash as two teams bask in the limelight provided by the Kraft Fight Hunger Bowl. The subjective human polls, the ridiculous computer polls, the teams that get shafted because their fan base won't likely generate enough money for the cash hungry bowl execs and the dream matchups that never materialize ... "Death to the BCS" pounds away at the bowl system repeatedly with a common sense approach supported by facts. The playoff alternative provided is both intriguing and logical ... something the bowl games are truly lacking. The authors present their playoff system in a manner to appeal to all sides of the argument as they agree, flaws and all, bowl games aren't all that bad ... it's the plaid-suit, sleazy bowl execs and the pencil-necked big conference athletic chairmen (collectively and "affectionately" referred to as the "Cartel") that ruin everything.

Admittedly, about halfway through the book, I succumbed to their argument. Although I firmly wrote off any future bowl trips following the 1999 Sugar Bowl (which cost more than my wife's two-week trip to Greece and Turkey), I still liked the controversy the bowl system provided and enjoyed seeing the Hokies . After reading "Death to the BCS", I felt as if I'd received an education on the BCS system and I didn't like what I had learned ... it angered me a little as I looked back at what that 1999 Sugar Bowl cost me. A tedious read at times due to the generally dull nature of financial reporting that comprises a good chunk of the reading material; overall, the book was quite enlightening. While "Death to the BCS" does aim to challenge the BCS system by offering an alternative, I felt the biggest impact was providing enough of a common-sense argument to effectively challenge the average college football fan's belief in the current BCS system.

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