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Managing Editor Scott Wright has been with The Post
since 1998. He is The
Wright Angle Spaceships and playoff systems By Scott Wright Back in September 1999, NASA lost a high-dollar orbiter because Lockheed Martin engineers built the spacecraft used English units and the NASA engineers who tried to place it into orbit around Mars were using the metric system to input their flight calculations. End result: a $125 million satellite is, to this day, floating in lazy ellipses around the sun. As Jay Leno eloquently lamented a couple of nights later on "The Tonight Show," the snafu proved you don't have to be a rocket scientist to be a rocket scientist. Which brings me to the Bowl Championship Series. I have resisted for years the temptation to lambaste in the public square the dim bulbs in college president's offices across the nation who insist that their football programs are somehow superior to the National Football League. A couple of Saturday nights ago, over 25 million people watched the Jacksonville Jaguars and Pittsburgh Steelers fight to the final gun in an AFC playoff game (Steelers fan that I am, the outcome escapes me just now), about 2 million more viewers than the COMBINED audiences of the two major college bowl games held that same week. Narrow-minded college presidents have, for years, tried to convince themselves, and anyone else who'll listen, that their football programs are not a "feeder system" for the NFL. But I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that nearly every single one of the men who donned a uniform in that playoff game -- with the possible exception of the Steelers' left offensive tackle, but that's a topic for another column after I've had a few weeks to cool off -- played college football at some point. Last month, Ohio State president E. Gordon Gee reinforced his stance against a college football playoff thusly: "They'll have to wrench a playoff system out of my cold, dead hand. It smacks too much ... of a farm system for the pros." Huh? The guy's a college president, folks, got a diploma and everything. As www.salon.com columnist King Kaufman pointed out in a Jan. 10 article, college presidents will "come around eventually," if for no other reason than one day it will be their football team that gets left out of the BCS championship game. As Kaufman noted, University of Georgia president Michael Adams changed his tune last week after the Bulldogs were excluded from the Jan. 7 title matchup. In a letter to the NCAA, Adams asserted that the current format undercuts "the integrity and sportsmanship of the game." (As a friend pointed out to me a few days ago, Adams is the same nitwit who fired Georgia Athletics Director and former head coach Vince Dooley, so his definition of "integrity" may differ from yours, mine and most everyone else's.) Kaufman's solution: start an eight-team tournament in December with the final on New Year's Day. "The big bowls," Kaufman wrote, "would be smart to get on board as hosts of quarterfinal and semifinal games." I don't even know if this Kaufman fellow has a college degree, but he's come up with a solid, common sense solution to a problem that everyone in the world (except for a few suits) agrees has to be handled. If he has an eye for detecting the difference in the increments on opposite sides of a slide rule, Kaufman might even have a promising future with NASA. As for (until a few days ago) Adams and the rest of those stonewalling college presidents, maybe they could be "volunteered" for the next manned mission to Mars? They can even take all 32 (or, metrically speaking, 14.5) of those pointless, practically unwatchable bowl games with them. |