Jim Souhan: Let's have a playoff, not this BCS mess

What the repressed, inbred, bought-and-sold "organizers" of the Bowl Championship Series have wrought is not just a postseason that is obviously inferior to anyone's proposed playoff bracket but inferior to the archaic bowl system it replaced.

If it weren't bad enough that college presidents charge Tiffany prices for Wal-Mart college educations that lead to Burger King jobs, now they've gone and ruined the pleasure of watching semi-meaningful games while catnapping off hangovers on New Year's Day.

What we should have on New Year's Day is a four-game playoff featuring the most fabled traditional bowls -- Rose, Orange, Cotton and Sugar -- and leading to semifinals named after corn chips and a title game named after the highest bidder, probably one warning against the dangers of excitement levels lasting more than four hours, which is more time than the BCS keeps us excited every January.

Right now we have the championship series that isn't one, a one-game playoff determined by polls, Ouija Boards, secretaries who vote for their coaches, biorhythm readings and the price of tea in China.

Not only is this system inferior to any protracted or fairly determined playoff, it is inferior to Ye Olde Bowle System. If you're not going to fairly determine the national champion with a legitimate, bracketed, seeded playoff system, you should at least be honest about the method in which you create doubt and debate.

A true eight-team playoff would create seven do-or-die games that would challenge the NFL playoffs for all-time high TV ratings. Even a four-game playoff, while less definitive, would create the proper national gauntlet for a true national champion.

If the failed intellectuals who run the NCAA can't devise anything resembling a playoff, they should scrap the intellectually dishonest one-game "series" they feature now and go back to a bowl system in which the bowls are meaningful, and in which debate would be the point.

Now what do we have? A system in which the winner of the LSU-Ohio State game on Monday night will be established as a legitimate, unquestioned national champ, even though any college football fan with a sense of drama and curiosity will be dying to see the winner of that game compete with the winners of what has been an awful and inconclusive run of January bowl games.

Who wouldn't want to see college football's major bowl blowout winners -- Georgia, Missouri, West Virginia, USC, Kansas and the LSU-OSU victor -- keep playing?

The NFL is the model for all sports leagues in terms of marketing and packaging its dramas. The NFL has fewer interesting teams and far less variety of style than college football, and yet it is the NFL that will capitalize on the drama of a lengthy playoff system.

Giants-Bucs? Titans-Chargers? Jaguars-Steelers? Redskins-Seahawks? On any given Sunday during the NFL seasons, those games wouldn't be of particular interest. In the playoffs, they will dominate the sports ratings, while the best games of the college football season will remain unplayed.

If we can't have a legitimate playoff, let's go back to Ye Olde Bowle System, in which the debates were at least healthy and interesting.