Playoffs?!

Ah, bowl season, when a sportswriter's fancy turns to bitching about the system currently in place for determining a national champion. Frustrated by the subjectivity of the current BCS system, which chooses two participants in a National Championship game based in part on computer rankings and coaches' polls, many sportswriters are championing a playoff of between four and sixteen teams to determine the champion. Even Barack Obama has thrown his weight behind this proposal.

I too am for a playoff. I think it would be fun to watch, fun to bet on, and would produce more interesting matchups than what we are getting now. I am for a playoff for just about any reason, so long as it does not include fairness. A playoff would not eliminate subjectivity from the picture, it would just rearrange it.

Obama, uncharactaristically tongue-tripped by sports-speak, is "fed up with these computer rankings, and this and that and the other. Get eight teams, the top eight teams right at the end, you got a playoff, decide on a national champion."

But how will you choose the eight teams, Mr. President? The wishy-washy "this that and the other" that afflicts the selection of two teams will apply to picking eight, only worse. If you follow college football, you probably have a good handle on the Texas-Oklahoma controversy. You know the arguments for each team and you have an opinion on who was more deserving to play in the Big 12 Championship (and likely the National Chapmionship). Texas and Oklahoma were competing for the second and third spots. Now quick, who are the eighth and ninth best teams in the country, and why is the eighth better than the ninth? How about the 25th and 26th teams? The farther down you go, the more specious the arguments for preferring one team to another.

Some might argue that getting the eighth team wrong doesn't matter, because they have little to no chance to win anyway. But if they cannot win, why are they in the playoff in the first place? Either they have a chance and choosing the right eighth team matters, or they do not and the playoff is too big.

The truth, of course, is that there is no right choice, just a cluster of similarly qualified teams. Your preference for the eighth team depends on how you value various considerations (head-to-heard record, strength of schedule, point differential, etc.), just like your preference for the best and second best team in the country. Picking the teams for a playoff will suffer from exactly the same issues as picking the teams for a championship game.

Nonetheless, probably the ninth team out will not spark the same amount of sympathy and outrage as the third team does now. Whichever team ends up ninth will have obvious blemishes on their record that inoculate the viewer against a sense of injustice. You will always be able to say about the ninth team, had they played better, won more games, they would have made it.

What really piques some people is the possibility now of an undefeated team being left out of the National Championship game. They did everything they could, the thinking goes, never faltered, and were robbed of their shot at glory by a crooked system. This line of thinking, like arguing for the playoff because it would be more fair, places an undue moral emphasis on winning.

Ignoring the ambiguities of picking eight teams is a minor conceit of the playoff system. The major conceit, which permeates nearly all of sports commentary, is that winning a given game proves which team is best.

It is hard to argue with the idea that the best team is the team that is most likely to win the most games. Once we have accepted this definition, it becomes clear that a team's past record is an imperfect measure of how good they are. As the saying goes, anyone can win on any given Saturday. There is no escaping chance.

So even if it were possible to choose the best eight teams, the playoff between those teams would not prove which team is best, it would just prove who is champion as defined by the accepted rules - the same thing the current system proves. A playoff would not be any more fair in an absolute sense.

But it would be fun.