As you sit back today to watch any number of the six college bowl games, you might come across Chronicle sportswriter John Lopez’s column from yesterday in which he characterizes this past Saturday’s EV1.net Houston Bowl as the “Apathy Bowl” because of the low turnout from local football fans and renews the call for an NFL-style playoff system to determine a national champion in NCAA Division I-A college football.
Lopez’s opinion is a common one, arguably even the majority view of most folks who follow college football passionately. However, it is wrong for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is the health of college football as we know it.
Lopez’s view is that the BCS system — which has set up Wednesday’s USC-Texas Rose Bowl matchup for the national championship and will have a championship game next season a week after four major New Year’s Day bowl games — is killing the bowl system, anyway. He cites the low attendance figures for lesser bowl games that do not figure in the national championship equation as dispositive evidence that the bowl system is flawed and that a playoff system would generate far more interest (i.e., money). Lopez predicts that peripheral bowls will die off as sponsors ditch games for lack of interest in the face of the more popular BCS bowl games.

Continue reading →