Oh, Bill Hancock, the man the BCS didn't hire to speak for the BCS because the BCS doesn't exist. You are a valiant man, sent into battle against axe-wielding college football fans in your underwear, armed only with a banana and a skimpy pair of cheap white cotton boxers to repel the blows of his critics.
The results are bloody, but you must admire the valor. From USA Today's Hancock-penned defense of the BCS.
We've been called communists, a cartel, crooks — and worse — but that's malarkey.
Hooey! Fooferaw! Hoodilly Stew! Everyone from the squarest old bluenose to the hip-hippiest shieks and shebas knows the BCS is the bees' knees! Now where's my bathtub gin? I gotta get my favorite gal ossified before she closes the bank on me!
If the BCS were corrupt, how could a missed field goal in the Boise State-Nevada game and a 24-point comeback by Auburn over Alabama have made such a difference?
A valid line of questioning. For instance, the BCS only left one undefeated team out in the cold this year. How can that be called corrupt, or anything but improvement? It's like my physician, Dr. Ridley. Why doctor, I think you're improving, since you only amputated the wrong leg at the knee this time. Last year there's no telling what you would have done. While you're at it, i will take that leg and make an ashtray of it: like the undefeated 2009 Boise State team, it does make such a fascinating conversation piece.
If this were the shady system that some people claim, how could Boise State have been only inches away?
Because there would have been an undefeated Auburn or Oregon team sitting right outside, looking in on the party from the cold night like a street urchin? Bill Hancock notes that while controversial, the Chinese infantry's tactics of rushing human waves of infantry at American lines in the Korean War only yielded 33% casualties, and were thus successful. He also makes cakes by pouring half the cake batter on the bottom of the oven and dubbing it a success.
The abuse from the critics is balderdash.
The card reads: DIVERSION. The correct definition for the Dasher is "a defense mechanism postulated by Sigmund Freud, in which a person is faced with a fact that is too uncomfortable to accept and rejects it instead, insisting that it is not true despite what may be overwhelming evidence." Man, this game is too easy sometimes, though you know you're going to have one easy guess out there when your brother writes "A fez for your testicles" or "I LIKE TO FART" on a card and turns it in for you to read out loud for the group.
(Additionally, Bill Hancock has decided to write this entire editorial from 1923, which is why this letter is covered in influenza, jazz, and Warren G. Harding's mistress's perfume.)
The fact is the BCS accomplishes its mission with a stunningly popular national championship game. It regularly draws more viewers than the NCAA Final Four, the World Series, the NBA Championships and the Stanley Cup Playoffs. And it does this while maintaining college football's wonderful regular season and also by preserving America's unique multiday bowl tradition that rewards student-athletes with a celebratory bowl-game week.
You know, it isn't the heroin that addicts love. It's the little bow the really nice dealers tie around the balloons. They're the best!
The bowl system really is special, too, because we all know how much 20 year-olds enjoy being forced to play meaningless exhibition games in front of indifferent crowds in places people haven't considered vacation spots since the advent of electricity. As far as I know the only magic I've seen in a bowl game came two years ago when I watched young members of the Memphis football team try to pick up 45-year-old ladies from a black sorority reunion.
Actually, now that I've recalled that memory, Bill Hancock's right. Watching dudes in sweatpants courting women in full evening dresses the night before their big game was worth the entire superfluity of the bowl system. Carry on, Bill.
Commies? A cartel? Give me a break. The BCS is a voluntary arrangement that benefits every university in the NCAA's Bowl Subdivision.
Really, serf. You're happier this way. Who knows what San Diego State would do with a full chance to compete on the open market? They'd probably eat the trophy or something, and that's silly because crystal isn't even edible. Why do you want Brady Hoke to eat glass and die, critic of the BCS? <----SERIOUSLY WE'RE BETTER AT THIS THAN BILL HANCOCK HIRE US FOR ONE DOLLAR LESS, BCS.
I know that they want to fill out a bracket, and that they want to watch more college football in December. They want their favorite team to have a slot in that bracket. But the desire for a different postseason format doesn't justify the false attacks against the BCS event.
That's a very rude thing you said to Lord Featherstone, young man. Yes, he takes 60 cents of every dollar you own, and occasionally runs people down with his carriage in the streets without pause or apology, but simply because you want "another way of being that doesn't involve getting run over in the gutter by the aristocracy" doesn't mean you can criticize the system that puts you there. Look, you've made Lord Featherstone cry, and me beat you unconscious with this cudgel. Look what you've made us do! Look at the emotional wreck you've made of Lord Featherstone! He's stained his winged lapels over this!
A playoff also would mean the end of America's bowl tradition as we know it. As Rick Baker, president of the Cotton Bowl, said, "A playoff system would ruin the AT&T Cotton Bowl Classic."
A meaningless bowl game would become more meaningless than already meaningless. Divide by zero: Bill Hancock has just accomplished it.
A playoff, on the other hand, would be limited to a small number of schools, and it would turn their celebratory week into a series of one-day business trips because the teams would arrive the day before the game and leave right afterward. If they won, they'd need to get ready for next week's game. That's not a bowl party — that's another game on the schedule.
Bill Hancock seems to have a real party deficiency in his life, or maybe parties or more important to him than we'll ever know. Maybe Bill Hancock hopped off the plane at LAX with a dream and his cardigan, and was like, "Welcome to the land of fame, excess, whoa am I gotta fit in?" And then jumped in the cab, like "Here I am for the first time," and looked to his right, and saw the Hollywood sign.
And this was all so crazy, because everybody seemed so famous! He then experienced some stomach discomfort, and thought of his home and felt sad because you know, pressure and nerves and all. But then someone turned on the radio, and...it was not a Jay-Z song, but again someone complaining on sports radio about the BCS, which is not a playoff, and thus doesn't come close to crowning a real national champion in college football no matter how many incoherent op-eds USA Today gives him or how many plastic helmets the Beef O'Brady's St. Pete Bowl gives to football players.
(Bill Hancock is wearing hot pants and strappy heels the whole time he's putting his hands up and singing these last two paragraphs, but you already knew this.)
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