THE first week of college football is usually a dud. While it’s nice to finally see the teams hit the gridiron after an eight-month break, for the most part the games aren’t fun to watch.
It’s actually that way for the first few weeks of the season. Most top 25 teams schedule weaker opponents during these games. They do this to work out the kinks before jumping into conference play, where the opponents are tougher and the games mean a lot more. The first few weeks of the year are basically college football’s preseason.
But every so often, you get a game like Oregon at LSU. Here we are, the first week of the season, and we have the No. 3 and 4 teams in the country playing against each other.
It makes for a must-see game.
But for as much as I complain about the monotony of the warmup games teams play, they play those for a reason.
They do this because they don’t want their season to be doomed after 60 minutes of play.
Because of the way the BCS is set up, chances are the loser of Saturday’s game between the Ducks and Tigers will not have a shot at the national title game.
Let that sink in for a moment.
After months of workouts for players and preparation by the coaches, the whole season comes down to the first game of the year.
It’s not right.
Sure it makes for a good storyline, with two powerhouse teams laying everything on the line early one.
After all, if a team wants to prove it’s the best, players need to play their best every game of the season, whether that be the first or the last.
But where’s the room for improvement?
Scheduling such a big game early means that a team’s offense needs to click like it’s December when we’re still in the dying weeks of summer.
For both of these schools, a season won’t be a success unless a national championship is won. If I were a fan of either of these schools I wouldn’t be able to watch this game. I couldn’t fathom a season being deemed meaningless after the first week of the year.
What if Oregon loses this game, but improves so tremendously over the course of the season that the Ducks are barnone the best team in the league? That’s too bad. They lost back in the first week of September.
This, just like countless other reasons, is why the BCS needs to move to a playoff system. That way a team could make up for a poor start and the best team at the end of the year will be crowned the best team in the league.
As it stands right now, the better team could lose on Saturday and that team won’t be in the conversation come January.
