Bill Hancock, the executive director of the much-maligned Bowl Championship Series, said in a recent interview that he would love to see a playoff in college football. He just can’t figure out brackets.
“I’ve never really understood them,” Hancock admitted. “And it’s not just me, either. We sit around the BCS meetings for hours looking at brackets and they make no sense. How come something called a high seed gets put in the one spot? One is the lowest number–I’ve known that since second grade.”
Big Ten commissioner Jim Delaney, who has worked with Hancock on the problem, says he is just as baffled.
“When the Big Ten had 11 teams, did you ever look at the bracket for our conference basketball tournament?” he asked. “I never knew who was doing what. I just knew that Izzo would somehow have his guys ready to play. I finally quit going because I thought someone might ask me about it.”
Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott, who has been on the leading edge of conference realignment and lucrative television packages, said he would take himself out of the meetings when they pulled out sample brackets because his head would start to swim.
“I was in a softball tournament a few years ago and my team had a bye. A bye? I still remember asking, ‘What’s a bye?’ Nobody seemed to know.”
Hancock said the committee revisits the idea of a playoff at every meeting. At the end, though, someone always raises the same point.
“‘Why don’t we just have the two best teams play each other?’ someone will ask,” said Hancock. “The rest of us will look around, shrug, and say ‘Sounds good to me.'”
