'House Roundtable: Super Bowl vs. BCS

The Arizona Cardinals shocked the NFC by advancing to Super Bowl XLIII. It's an incredible accomplishment for two reasons: 1) They're the Arizona Cardinals, a team that has forever been synonymous with losing and 2) They were a 9-7 team in the regular season, losing four of their final six regular season games, some in embarrassing fashion. And here they are in the biggest game of the season, playing for all the marbles.

The Cardinals' meteoric rise to the spotlight has prompted some discussion as to how fair the NFL's one-and-done playoff system is compared to the BCS, and if the Cardinals are "bad for the NFL" -- including this article by Stewart Mandel of Sports Illustrated. Naturally, the NFL FanHouse crew had some opinions on the matter.

Adam Gretz: Okay, I'll try to get the ball rolling here and I'll start by saying this: I don't think there's any system that is going to give us the best team as a champion every single season. It's just not going to happen. Sometimes the best team (the 2007 Patriots, for example) doesn't win, for whatever reason. That's why they're called upsets. What the playoffs do is at least give us a champion that cannot be disputed in a last man standing, king of the hill, I survived every team's best shot sort of way. Every team knows knows exactly what it takes to get into the postseason and there's absolutely no mystery about it. You know the tie-breakers, you know the seeding structure, you know what you have to do. Beyond that, I think the question "are the Cardinals bad for the NFL" is kind of ridiculous, and the only reason it's being asked is because we've been trained like Pavlov's dogs to associate losing football with the Cardinals. When the Steelers and Giants went on their Super Bowl runs as No. 6 seeds nobody was asking if they were "bad for football". Nobody was asking if the Baltimore Ravens (a No. 6 seed one game from a Super Bowl berth this season) were bad for football. Quite the opposite, actually.

Will Brinson: Exactly -- when the Ravens went on a tear as a six seed, people said "Holy ____, they might be the best team in football." And they didn't mean "finished with the best regular season record" because that's not the best team in football. The best team in football is the one that doesn't lose a playoff game. And I love that people try and shrug off the Cardinals as having a horrible regular season; they looked horrible down the stretch but as late November, everyone was fine with their performance as a team. (Note that I'm not calling out MDS, obviously, just that the Cards were 7-3 and there wasn't much question as to their legitimacy. Then I read something like the Titans' 13-3 record "earned them ... bupkis" and, well, pardon me for being blunt, but that's just stupid. What it did earn them was the number one seed in the AFC and the theoretically easiest route to the playoffs. That's the advantage that playing well in the regular season gets you. Not a good excuse to bias a bunch of people who vote without watching enough football.

Bruce Ciskie: Our colleague Brian Grummell offered up a bit of a pro-BCS rant. In the comments, another colleague, Ray Holloman, presents my least favorite pro-BCS argument.

Besides, not all sports crown their champions with playoffs. The champion of the English Premier League is awarded to the team with the most regular season points and the English seem to care more about that than the UEFA Cup. Of course, I can't say I watch much EPL as I have more interesting things to do, like sock maintenance or cataloging different species of mountain goat.

I'll leave the insult alone, because it doesn't dignify a remark. You don't like soccer? That's fine. You can avoid looking like an unoriginal buffoon by just not lobbing a dumb insult at the sport. But the argument doesn't hold any water. The champion of the English Premier League is certainly not decided by a playoff. Instead, it's decided after each team in the league has played the other 19 teams, home and away. It's a grueling 38-game schedule, and it matters because it's balanced. The day that college football goes with a balanced schedule so everyone plays everyone at least once, we can talk about not having a playoff to determine the champion. Until then, I refuse to apologize for thinking that neither a computer nor a human being has any business trying to decide if Florida is better than Utah or Texas or USC when we can just arrange to have them play each other in an actual tournament. There's a reason that only one major team sport in the United States refuses to use a playoff to determine its champion. It's that the people who run major college football are ostriches. The notion that the Arizona Cardinals are bad for the NFL is preposterous. Everyone in the NFC had an equal shot at getting to this point, and only the Cardinals played well enough and were coached well enough to earn it. Anyone whining over this is simply, well, whining.

Brinson: Agreed on the whining part too ... if the Cardinals aren't your team and you think they represent all that is evil and wrong about this insane "playoff system", then tell your team not to lose. Then maybe they'd have their shot at a title.

Matt Snyder: Champion doesn't mean "best regular season team." Period. Were the Pittsburgh Steelers better than the Colts last time they won the Super Bowl? Probably not, but they beat them in the playoffs, when it matters most, so they got to take home the title: Champion. Playoffs are good for sports because they add intrigue. On college football, I haven't watched a game in years because I just can't take the system. People want to argue that they already have a playoff, and it's called the regular season. Well, how did that "playoff" work out for Utah? That's not a playoff, it's an elitist scheme where only the "major players" are allowed to have a shot. Not to mention the system lets computers decide who the final two teams are. I'd be a lot more on board if there were always a clear-cut top two teams, but that's rarely -- if ever -- going to be the case. It's really an argument of convenience. I'm a fan of a maligned sport, so let's jump on the opportunity to say why our system is better, all at the expense of the Arizona Cardinals. The thing is, this Cardinals run is exactly why the playoffs are better. We've watched the Cards grow from a 9-7 teams into one that probably would win 12 or so if they got to play their schedule over. They aren't the same team as the one who was trampled by the Eagles and the Patriots. As for the Titans, if you want to head to the Super Bowl, maybe you shouldn't turn the ball over routinely in the red-zone. There are no do-overs.

Gretz: What about the idea that a team like the Cardinals (or the Steelers and Giants) invalidates the regular season? I couldn't disagree with this more. Touching on what Snyder brought up about the college football argument being "the regular season is our playoff," am I the only one that finds the college football regular season to be incredibly boring? I mean, I just can't find myself to get interested in those epic Ohio State - Youngstown State tilts. I know a couple of Penn State fans that, going into their yearly games with Temple and Florida Atlantic, talk about how they'll be leaving at halftime with the decision already in hand. This is exciting? Seriously?

Ciskie: I'm sure that all those 88,000 or so were thrilled to pay full admission price to watch Florida stomp on The Citadel. I wrote a piece last summer where I proposed a rule that would ban any team from BCS consideration if they scheduled more than two I-AA opponents over a rolling six-year period. These schools don't care who the opponent is, as long as they can sell out their stadium with lemmings who will pay anything to hear their stupid fight song after every one of those eight first-half touchdowns.

Josh Alper: No, it isn't exciting to watch big conference teams refuse to play teams that might beat them just so they can stay on track for the trough of money at the end of the season. Florida played the Citadel, for heavens sakes, and we're supposed to roll over in admiration of them at the end of the season because they only had one loss playing in the SEC? Super. Play a real schedule filled with real teams and maybe there will be a leg for the BCS to stand on. I'm with Bruce. Play a balanced schedule and stop beating up on FCS and weak-sister conference opponents if you want to say that the regular season is your playoffs. It would be nice for all of the BCS apologists to just admit the real reason why it is the preferred system. The money is too good for the big conference schools to give up for a system that is both fairer and more definitive.

Thought I'd throw this in too, since it doesn't look like there will much anti-playoffs sentiment. If college doesn't want to have playoffs, they should have never changed the system that they had before. Pre-BCS there was a chance that you'd have a ton of bowl games that meant something because whatever voting went on wasn't done until after all of the games were played. Sure, you might have multiple champions but since you aren't getting it done on the field, what's the difference. Now you wait more than a month for a game that settles nothing while they play a slew of games that don't mean anything unless you root for one of the schools.

Snyder: I wholeheartedly agree. The old bowl system had much more intrigue. Even the "other" BCS games are meaningless. You are playing for third place at best.

Brinson: I agree with the notion that big time schools cop out on the scheduling; what would be nice is some sort of requirement to play an upper echelon mid major (or what have you) every year. Look at Carolina -- they had a cake schedule this year and a good team, so they backed out of playing Appalachian State (the quintessential giant killer) in favor of McNeese St or some such cupcake. On the same note, and just at the expense of playing devil's advocate, it's not like the Cardinals had a tough scheduling run with the NFC West. But that's also part of the whole parity thing in the NFL; Seattle, St. Louis and San Francisco have all been good-->great at one point over the past 15-20 years. Why? Because the NFL isn't already structured to feed the best players to the teams with the highest winning percentage, the most national cache and the most money to spend. It's an already unbalanced system becoming more unbalanced because the smaller fish don't have the chance to compete in recruiting. And why would any high end recruits want to come? They know just as well as everyone else that the system shuts them out of a shot at winning a national title.

Stephanie Stradley: Who is stupid enough to say that the Cardinals are bad for football? They play an extremely entertaining brand of football and have made it this far because their defense figured things out down the stretch. I have little use for college football. It's all about a couple meaningful games, playing directional schools and not losing. Only a few teams have a real shot. And if you look at the history of teams getting to the playoffs in the NFL, it has a ton of teams that had a relatively easy schedule that year. In a parity league, that can make a huge difference. The Steelers are an impressive SB participant because of the brutality of their schedule this year.

Ryan Wilson: Why is the unexpected a bad thing? I mean, isn't that why we have cliches like "the games aren't played on paper" and "any given Sunday"? Since 2000, at least six teams that no one expected to be playing in January (much less February) made it to the Super Bowl: '00 Ravens, '01 Patriots, '03 Panthers, '05 Steelers, '07 Giants and now the '08 Cardinals. When's the last time college football could make that claim? And, shockingly, the NFL has survived through it all. In fact, they're the most popular sport on the planet, despite these insane notions of "parity" and "leveling the playing field." Just because a few schools part of the BCS monolith like the status quo (and they'd be stupid not to), doesn't mean it's a great deal for the other Division I schools. By the way, not one NFL fan is making the "hey, we need a sort of bowl system to determine winners; playoffs are patently biased and unfair!" argument. Fans like parity. Just ask all the Patriots haters who grew bored with Bill Belichick and Tom Brady running roughshod over the rest of the league earlier this decade. As for those who question if the NFL regular season has been rendered moot because any team qualifying for the playoffs has an equal chance to win the whole thing, here's my advice: you might want to tweak your model. Models, after all, are simple representations of very complex events. And since football is a complex game with thousands of variables, it seems reasonable that the model -- not Kurt Warner or Larry Fitzgerald -- is where the problem lies. Or you can just throw up your hands and call the Cardinals' remarkable late-season run "bad for the league." Either way works, really.