My wife and I have a mixed marriage. She’s a Florida Gators fan. I’m a Notre Dame Fighting Irish fan. Neither of us attended these institutions, but nevertheless, we have strong feelings about their respective football teams. As with most marriages, you tend to learn to love — or at least tolerate — the things that your spouse loves. That is the case with the Gators. I’ve watched just about every minute of Florida Gator football from this past season, which meant carving out time this fall to spend with my wife cheering her team onto victory.

Of course, we watched last night’s BCS Championship match-up between the Gators and the Ohio State Buckeyes. It was just a few short years ago that I cheered for Ohio State when they met Miami in the national championship game. I don’t like Miami at all, and I do have a certain affinity for Big Ten football, having grown up in Illinois. However, last night, we were behind the Gators in their drubbing of the Buckeyes.

Today, all the Buckeye apologists have emerged, making excuses for the loss. Rather than waste everyone’s time trying to answer them, I’d like to take up one claim that I think has some validity.

The Buckeyes last played a football game in mid-November. They had almost 60 days of downtime between their last regular season game and the championship game. That’s a long time. Did it factor into their poor performance last night? Possibly. Is it a good excuse for getting spanked by 27 points? No.

However, I agree that the current BCS system is a mess. While it aimed at solving some problems, it’s created many more. Here are some of the things that need to be addressed:

• The long layoff between regular season and bowl games. Unless you’re playing in the Poinsettia Bowl, which was played about a week before Christmas, you’re looking at about a five or six week layoff between your last regular season game and your bowl game. This is fine if you’re playing in a meaningless game like the Emerald Bowl or the Meineke Car Care Bowl. But for BCS bowl games that have meaning, it’s absurd to think that teams will be in the same shape before Thanksgiving, after having played a dozen consecutive weeks, as they will be the first week in January.
• The wrath of the poll voters. One of my biggest gripes is that while the BCS poll is an equation that considers some objective data — the so-called computer rankings — a good two thirds of the poll is based on subjective opinions — the Harris Interactive Poll and the Coaches Poll. Now, I understand that’s part of the grand tradition of college football, but the wisdom of the masses isn’t always the best criteria. For example, this year, Ohio State defeated Michigan in the last regular season game or both schools. Going into that game, the teams were ranked #1 and #2, respectively. After a close win by Ohio State, Michigan dropped, and ultimately missed out on a chance to play for the national championship, presumably because the voters didn’t want to see a rematch between the two schools. While I agree with that sentiment, I wonder if that’s the kind of decision that the voters should be making. Shouldn’t the national championship game feature the best two teams in the country, as measured by some more objective, more competitive standard?
• Conference bias. As a corollary to my last point, in college football, certain conferences have reputations among the poll voters, and those reputations inform or influence the voting process. However, conferences tend to change over the years. Strong conferences will diminish in strength, while weaker conferences may improve. What was true even 3 or 4 years ago might not be true today. It seemed like no one wanted to give an SEC team like Florida a shot at playing for the national championship, while everyone wanted to give USC or Michigan that opportunity. At the same time, there seems to be a positive perception of Notre Dame, despite their recent mediocre bowl performances. There’s also a perception that teams like Boise State, Rutgers, and Wake Forest should never been considered strong teams, based on the history of their programs and their conferences.

So what to do? I think a BCS playoff system must be put together in the near future. Even if it’s 3 to 5 years away, it needs to happen. There are just too many problems with the current system. So what does that look like?

The easiest solution would be to simply construct a 4-team playoff system. A college football “Final Four”, so to speak. Take the top 4 teams in the BCS poll and match them up in a two-round playoff, with the 4 BCS bowls rotating their position in the tournament.

You could expand it to 6 teams pretty easily if the desire was to include more teams and more bowl venues. Either way, there has to be a cleaner way to determine who the best college football team in the country really is. College basketball has it figured out, as do all the schools who play division 1A, 2, and 3 football.

For now, we’re proud of the Gators, but the great thing about college football is that next season begins today.