Even with playoff, BCS rankings need reworking

For the second week in a row after the Bowl Championship Series rankings have come out, the Oregon Ducks have steadily fallen from second only to the Alabama Crimson Tide, to third behind the Florida Gators, and now, once again, down to fourth place with the rise of Kansas State.

The new rating was met with a lot of outrage amongst Oregon fans. After all, why should the Ducks ever fall in rankings if they’ve remained perfect thus far?

Personally, I have no issue with Florida being ahead of Oregon.

That’s not to say I don’t think the Ducks are playing well. It’s just that if you beat a fourth-ranked LSU and are unbeaten yourself, and then go on to demolish a top-10 team in South Carolina, 44 to 11, you’ve earned your way to at least second rank.

The real issue is when you have a Kansas St. team passing up the Ducks when their only quality win is against then-sixth-ranked Oklahoma. And, no, beating an obviously overrated West Virginia (which got embarrassed in a 48-14 loss to Texas Tech) is not a quality win.

Don’t get me wrong, the Sooners are a great team. But thinking about things logically: how does narrowly beating a sixth Oklahoma 24-19 prove that Kansas St. is the better team then second-ranked Oregon? It doesn’t.

In general, it’s these sorts of instances why college football fans find themselves groaning every Sunday as soon as the BCS rankings come out and scratch their heads in disbelief at some of the ridiculous computer ratings used in the process.

The fact that we are using computers that don’t watch the game themselves should be worrisome enough, but when you have the Sagarin ratings, one of the computer rankings used in the BCS poll, putting two-loss teams such as Texas A&M in the top 10, while pushing lossless teams like Oregon St. and Ohio St. out, it can be frustrating.

Lucky for us, with the BCS presidents approving a four-team play-off system last June, this atrocious system of essentially voting in the national champion will become a thing of the past.

The bad news is we have to wait until the 2015 season.

That’s going to be two more years after this season of “imaginary” national championships and deserving teams left in the cold just because they might call the Northwest home, as opposed to the deep South.

Two more years of “you’re not good enough” without even getting the opportunity to prove yourself.

Even when we do move on to the four-team playoff, we’re still going to be stuck with the BCS ranking system, which will no doubt cause even more conflict as teams battle for the coveted top four ranks.

That’s why as fans, it should be our duty to continue pushing the BCS and the NCAA into expanding the playoffs till we get to a sensible 16-team playoff and play the game as it should be: Where no team gets the short end of the stick, even if they might not have the letters “SEC” painted on their fields.

But given the ineffective system we’re stuck with currently, it will have to do.

Because I know that even if Oregon isn’t the team to rise as national champion that 2015 season, I will sigh in relief.