Guilty Until Proven Innocent

Normally at this time of year I'm complaining about the lack of a championship in college football and the ridiculousness of the BCS and all the meaningless bowl games. I'm still hopeful that I will see a college football playoff in a few years but what's really got me pissed off is the whole Cam Newton affair. Yes, I'm biased. My husband went to Auburn, his family lives there, he has a relative who is a professor and we frequently visit. But my problem with this situation is more about the way the media is handling all the accusations against the quarterback and not the team that he plays for.

Cam Newton and his family are accused of asking for and taking money from Auburn University in exchange for him playing football there. There is no physical evidence of this. There are several people who talked to other people who claim to know someone who heard the Newton's ask for money. There is no paper trail. There was no sudden shift in the Newton's lifestyle when Cam transferred to Auburn. Despite the lack of evidence, people are saying that Newton should be suspended. That he doesn't deserve the Heisman trophy. That he is a disgrace to college football and another Reggie Bush-type player only looking out for himself on his way to the NFL.

It seems like anyone can accuse any famous person of being guilty of breaking the rules without evidence. The media obsesses over these stories because we are so hungry to see our celebrities fail. Because in this age of reality TV we are more concerned with who Snooki hooked up with on The Jersey Shore than the recession.

Maybe Cam Newton is guilty. Maybe in a few years there will be physical evidence to back up all the accusations. Maybe Auburn will have to forfeit the wins that they earned while he was a starter and he will have to return his Heisman trophy (a la USC and Reggie Bush). But unless we have a crystal ball we cannot punish someone for something that may prove to be true.

How many athletes have been accused of being some baby's daddy only to find out a few months later it wasn't true. When the athlete was accused it's front page news but if they're proven innocent it's hidden on the back cover. I know plenty of college athletes take money. I know lots of famous people break that law and get away with it because they're famous. I also know that the bad ones get a lot more press than the good ones and that we can't punish an seemingly nice kid until there is evidence that proves that he deserves it.

What's Wrong With College Football

1. Pre-season rankings. How do you know a team is number 1 this year if they lost half of their team to the NFL at the end of last season and half of their current starters are freshman? I know they do it in college basketball too but in college basketball their postseason success isn't determined by their ranking. Which brings us to....

2. The BCS and bowl game system in general. So explain to me why its good for college football for mediocre teams from big conferences to play in 30 meaningless bowl games rather than to use some of those same games for a playoff? I went to a Big Ten school and I think that automatically giving the Big Ten and other big conference schools a place in bowl games without any consideration for how good other teams are is ridiculous. We will never know which team is the best because if you aren't in a big conference then you can never be a national champion. If you don't have some human selection committee, like they do in college basketball,in addition to the polls then college football will never get it right. Strength of schedule, AP and USA today polls with input from biased coaches and sports writers and other strange statistics that play into the BSC formula are not an accurate assessment of which teams are the best. Lets be honest, the bowl system rewards big time schools with big time money (that they really don't need) and the bowl games in no way reward the most gifted teams. People don't get excited about post season college football the way they do about college basketball and March Madness and they never will unless something changes.

My proposal would be a 12 team playoff. The top 8 teams in the BCS get an automatic bid into the postseason (I don't think we'll ever get rid of the BCS completely). Then a panel of experts selects 4 at large teams to also be in the series. The top four teams in the BCS get an automatic bye and do not have to play the first week. The #5-#8 teams in the BCS play against the 4 at large teams. The four winners of those games face off against the #1-#4 teams in the BCS in the second week of the playoffs. Then the third weekend you have the final four teams face off to determine who will play in the national championship game which would be played a week later. The 4 bowl games that host these playoff games and the national championship would rotate every year with a pool of tickets set aside for the home teams to buy once they are determined. The teams that are in this pool would be announced the last week of the college football season which is typically around Thanksgiving. These teams would be out of eligibility for other bowl games which could still honor the conference ties that they currently have. We already know that the results of most of the 30 bowl games are meaningless so lets not pretend like they are anything more than an exhibition game in a really cool location and and excuse to take a vacation on your university's dime.

3. Crappy non-conference schedule. This is a personal gripe but its not just my team that has this problem. As a Penn State alumni and proud football fan, I am sick of the 4 cupcake teams that have been on our schedule every year since my freshman year in 1994 and I'm sure many years before that. Why is everyone surprised when we lost to Iowa last weekend when we were tested by the likes of Akron, Temple and Syracuse in the previous weeks? And really, was anyone surprised when USC beat the crap out of us in the bowl game last year? We don't play teams of that caliber on a regular basis so why should we expect to be able to hold our own against them? Our opponents in previous years have included such football powerhouses as Rutgers and Coastal Carolina. Virginia Tech played Alabama as a non-conference game for their first game of the season. Yes, they lost that game but by playing against big time schools they have made their program better over the years. We will never win another championship unless we start to do this as well. We should have never been ranked #5 in the first place. If we would have gone undefeated this year and went into a national championship game ahead of Virginia Tech (who I hate with a passion) if their only loss was to Alabama, a much better team, I would have been pretty disgusted with the system.

I still love college football but it is in need of a serious overhaul.