Wear a nice shirt and bring your "A" game

Published Thursday, Dec. 31, 2009 in The Cameron Herald. Thanks to my good friend and fellow horned frog Bill Crist, publisher of the Herald, for his edits on this piece. Click here to see the article as it went to print.

------------------------------------------

Wear a Nice Shirt and Bring your "A" Game

People have been talking to me a lot about the BCS, mostly because of the success of my favorite team, the 4th-ranked TCU Horned Frogs. For the record, the reason that I and my family root for the Frogs is because lot of us went to school there. We are getting ready to fly out to Phoenix this weekend to watch them play in the Fiesta Bowl on Jan. 4.

I have a lot of friends, some of whom are Longhorn fans, who have expressed their sincere commiserations on TCU’s bowl opponent and suggest that we should have had a better game against a “legitimate” opponent. I appreciate the sentiment and am proud that our program is finally getting noticed, but we’re fine with it, really.

Sure, it would be cool to play in the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans against Florida, but that’s out of our control. We play in the Mountain West, which is not an “automatic qualifying” (AQ) conference and so we do not have a say in the matter. I’m not bitter, it’s just a fact. We are not in the BCS Club.

See, the BCS is like a big, exclusive golf club that you have to have a lot of money and prestige to join. If you are a member of this club then you are entitled to say who gets to play golf there. If you are not a member of this club you are still entitled to play golf, but you have to do it somewhere else, like on a publicly owned course. You may be an excellent golfer, and you might even be able to beat their best, but that in itself does not entitle you play on the exclusive course with the snooty guys in their club championship and drive their golf carts around and sit in their fancy bar and drink their booze.

Unless you are invited, of course.

This year the BCS National Championship game will be played on Jan. 7 in Pasadena, CA between Texas and Alabama. TCU was not invited to play in this game, even though we thoroughly thrashed some pretty good teams this year on the way to being undefeated. We are not an “AQ” team and neither is our opponent, #6 Boise State. So we don’t get to play for the championship. It’s like, we got invited to play at the nice club but we have to tee off on #10 while everyone else goes off to the first hole. Whatever.

The truth is, we are lucky to have been invited all. There are a lot of entities – big state schools, TV networks, and corporate sponsors – who have put up a lot of money to make sure America is entertained with the best college football possible. This entitles them to invite whoever they want to play in their bowls. TCU didn’t put up any of that money and so therefore we are not entitled to a say as to where we play or against whom.

Most people think that college football needs a playoff to decide its champion. We all know that this is not going to happen any time soon because too many people have invested too much money in the current system. Besides, if the football genie jumped out of a beer can tomorrow and granted us a playoff, we would still have the same problem: who automatically qualifies for the playoff? It would be better, but somebody would still be left out. At least we can all agree that the current championship is “all about the money” and leave it at that.

If the world were fair, the top 10 teams would qualify for the BCS bowls, period. And we would have a fair and equitable system for determining those 10 teams so that everyone has an equal shot at winning the big prize.

The world isn’t fair, however, and everyone is trying to protect their self-interest. And you certainly should be entitled to have control over the things you paid for. The BCS big-shots paid for the right to say who plays golf at their club. Sometimes, though, they are nice enough to invite a guest or two.

So if you are lucky enough to get an invitation to the fancy club, here’s my advice: wear a nice shirt, keep your mouth shut, laugh at their stupid jokes, then bring your “A” game and beat the hell out of your opponent.

Go Frogs!