I will be honest, I’ve waffled more than IHOP when it comes to the subject of a playoff in Division I College Football. To be even more honest, the anti-BCS argument always tends to push me the other way, because the anti-BCS argument is almost always so flawed that I can’t help but see it can’t possibly hold any water.

As a blogger, I always make it a point to read as a much as I write. I’m not omniscient; the beauty of technology is that is has allowed the interaction of people who otherwise would have never crossed paths. Kevin C.L. Chung is one of those people, and he wrote the perfect anti-BCS argument for me to really explain, maybe even as much to myself as anybody, why while the BCS isn’t perfect, it is a more realistic solution than a playoff would be.

Dear BCS,

Another season of American college football is fast approaching.

Do you want to be taken seriously? Do you want to make as much money as the NFL, if not more? Do you want to be seen as fair and impartial, as all college sports organizations should?

The last thing the BCS conferences need to worry about is money. For example, the SEC is raking in $2 billion by itself on its TV deal with CBS. When you stop to consider that college teams don’t have the overhead of NFL teams, you really don’t need to delve deep into the books to see the overall profit margins are likely comparable.

As for “fair and impartial,” well, that is the adult world’s equivalent of the Tooth Fairy and Santa Claus. It makes people feel better to believe in it, but it really doesn’t exist. Anybody who claims to be “fair,” “impartial,” and/or “balanced” never is – see Fox News.

If you said yes to any of the above questions, then you should remove automatically qualifying conferences and enable a tournament-style post season.

Now we start getting into the ugly realities of instituting a play-off. First of all, the “big” conferences are all about money. Today, they exist largely to ensure regional interest and television money; so much so that they’ve become brand names. If you doubt that, look at the Big Ten; look at how they made a deliberate effort to keep the name “Big Ten” despite the fact they have eleven members. Also, look up what the Big Ten Network generates in terms of total revenue.

Add to that the BCS is also largely a money exercise; teams got close to $20 million last year just for showing up. Since the conferences control college football, and since the bowl system is tied to the conferences, it is unrealistic to expect a change unless it is made financially rewarding.

* There is no way for a team from a non-automatic qualifying conference to play for the national championship, not even BCS busters. You are punishing schools for being unable to be a part of the right conference.

Tell that to Notre Dame. They know they can get to a championship game (if only they didn’t suck and would play anybody better that service academies and the bottom feeders of the Big Ten). The Irish have been to a BCS bowl in the last five years despite the fact they had three losses. Boise State has a legitimate shot at it this year as well. The formula is you have to be rated high in the pre-season and you can’t have a schedule full of cream puffs. Granted, it is easier to meet that criteria in a “big” conference, but is not impossible.

* Agents and benefactors pay more attention and infuse more money into BCS AQ schools. This ignores the players’ capabilities and hurts their professional careers, whether it’s sports related or not.

While this is a legitimate point, I’m not really sure what this has to do with a playoff. It only makes sense that agents and benefactors would spend more time at the “big” schools…if you want to catch fish, you go where the fish are; most of them are in the ocean known as the “big” schools.

* The current system is unfair to western schools. BCS pollsters are bunched in the east coast. By the time the western colleges play their games, most pollsters have gone to sleep and have already made their voting decisions. It’s very difficult to vote for a team, whose game is on at 2 AM. This is one reason why the SEC is so powerful.

Actually, the SEC is so powerful because it consistently puts the best teams on the field.  It also has a lot of influence in two of the best recruiting areas in the country, Florida and Texas. While “the east coast bias” does exist, it rarely hurts the truly talented teams. Nobody ignored USC just because they are in California, Texas never suffers from it; what kills western teams more often than not is they really aren’t very good.

* Evidence: Conference shake-ups. Recent school moves between conferences always shared one question on their minds: how would this affect the odds at BCS games?

Let’s be honest here. When we are talking about “BCS Busters,” we are historically only talking about four schools at the most: Brigham Young (who won a National Championship in the pre-BCS days), TCU, Boise State, and Utah (which will be a member of the Pac-10 in 2011). There is now no reason why a school that offers a reasonable athletic department can’t get into a “big” conference; BYU and TCU could both join the Big 12 tomorrow.

* Every other college sport does it. Practically every professional sport does it.

This is just the old “if everybody else jumped off a bridge, would you do it too?” argument.

* The models already exist and have been proven. Look at the NCAA Basketball and Volleyball tourneys. They incorporate each conference champion and incorporate wildcards. Easy.

This is likely the easiest part of setting up a play-off, other than you have to get Notre Dame into a conference. They have no interest in doing so as long as NBC is paying them to broadcast ND home games. If you don’t get them into a conference, then they serve as the model for a team to go get its own TV deal and blow the whole construct.

* Yes, you can keep Bowl games. BCS Bowl games would appear in the semifinal round. Non BCS Bowl game can appear in the first round. Bowl committees would shift their focus away from selecting teams and onto their real job: marketing the game.

That is really going to be easier said than done. Don’t forget, the “old-school” bowl games, such as the Rose, Orange, and Cotton (just to name a few) are based on local events that involve more than just football games. They have parades and all sorts of other events designed to bring in visitors who then spend money boosting the local economies. This is why bowl games were (before the latest gross proliferation) in warm weather destinations and done after the Christmas holidays. They were made to draw tourists, and to get fans from crappy-weather locales to come to Florida, Texas, and California around New Year’s Day.

Then there’s a scheduling problem. When is this play-off going to happen? Logic would dictate your playoff is going to have to be in December, during that time between the conference championship games and the bowls that people bitch about too. Moving an event from the week after Christmas to the week before runs the risk of killing the numbers of fans willing to travel to a neutral-site playoff game 1,500 miles from home. This compounds the problem inasmuch as now you have to deal not only with the ties between the bowls and the conferences; you also have to deal with the local Chambers of Commerce whose bottom line you are impacting.

And finally, there’s the issue of home-field advantage. If a team now has to win two or three playoff games in order to get to a championship game, in order to get the “big” schools to go along with this, you are going to have to promise them the ability to earn more home games, which equal money. This goes away once you use “small” bowl games as playoff games. Another problem you introduce is the meaning of regular-season games. Without the concept of playing for home-field advantage, you will create situations for top-ranked teams who will know with two games to go they are securely in a however-many-teams-you-want playoff format. Then they can pull what the Indianapolis Colts did last year; essentially mailing in the last two games of the regular season and alienating fans in the process.

* The post-season would be much more exciting. And much more revenue for the schools would be generated.

The post-season would be the only thing that is exciting, because nobody would care anymore about the regular season. Look at what happened to the TV ratings for college basketball. Cable outlets like ESPN used to make a haul on college basketball until the tournament was expanded to 64 teams. Once that happened, the top five teams from each “big” conference got into the tournament, so that Purdue-Michigan State or Duke-NC State game in February meant nothing since those teams were all getting into the “big dance” anyway.

Sure, the basketball tournament has become arguably one of the great sporting events in this country, but it came it at the expense of making the regular season meaningless. That’s the part that screwed the teams that aren’t in the big tournament; the regular season was where they made their money. So, the play-off in basketball made the rich get richer. So when you say “the models have been built and proven,” you are absolutely correct.

* Anyone who believes in fairness and equality in NCAA sports believes in a tournament-style post-season. Ask the White House. Ask the Justice Department.

A) See the aforementioned comments about “fairness and equality.”

B) The last thing this situation needs is governmental involvement. Not only do they have better things about which to worry, involving a government that could find a way to screw up a grilled cheese sandwich is no answer.

Like I’ve said, while the BCS is far from a perfect solution, it is currently the only realistic one. As much as there is such a clamor for a play-off, such a move as currently envisioned would create more problems than it would solve, and ultimately would not create a system that is “fair.” In order to create a play-off, there are so many external factors that would need to be addressed, and so many stakeholders in the current system that would need to have their interests placated that the structure of Division I football itself would need to be revamped before a true play-off system would be feasible.