Wake Forest Athletics
100% COTTEN
1/7/2005 12:00:00 AM | Football
Jan. 7, 2005
by Stan Cotten
I don't know about you - but I'm not satisfied. I know that Southern Cal looked awfully good in beating Oklahoma in the Orange Bowl January 4th for the BCS title and a national championship. But for me and a growing multitude of college football fans, BCS does not stand for Bowl Championship Series - it stands for Bowls Can't Satisfy. Would it be the end of the world if Auburn and USC played one more game to see who the best team in the nation is? I bet Utah would vote for the game. The unbeaten Utes even have an arguable point that they deserve a crack at Auburn and the winner of that game gets the Trojans for the championship.
The sad thing about all of this is that the same record keeps spinning. No, I guess the record is broken. And a fix is not in the foreseeable future.
The bowl games keep their week of fun, pay their teams and cash their own checks. And there is a lot of good in that. But after all the confetti is dropped, the New Year begins with three unbeaten major college football teams and one national champion.
Satisfied yet?
Don't get me wrong. When the BCS was formed it was a step in the right direction. But in my view, even as the BCS is tweaked to get closer to what is right, what stands out even more is what is wrong about not playing off at the I-A level for a national title.
I spent twelve years calling games at Carson-Newman, a small liberal arts school in the foothills of the Smoky Mountains in East Tennessee. At the time, the Eagles were a member of the NAIA. They are now a NCAA-II power. But the NAIA played off for its champion, as does Division II and I-AA today. And it was great.
Carson-Newman won five national football titles while I had the privilege of broadcasting the Eagles' games. I have the rings I would gladly show you. I'll never forget that first championship in 1983. What made it so special was that Carson-Newman sneaked into the playoff field and went on to become the first team ever with three regular season defeats to win the national championship. C-N also became the first team to claim the title on the road, winning on Mesa's home field back in 1983 in Grand Junction, Colorado. Carson-Newman was the lowest ranked (12th) team to make the playoff field but methodically, excitingly, wonderfully won a national championship.
To this day that playoff run ranks right up with the most exciting I've had as a broadcaster. And so was the run in my first season at Marshall when Jim Donnan's Thundering Herd won the 1992 I-AA national championship over Jim Tressell's Youngstown State Penguins. The winning points came from senior placekicker Willie Merrick on his first and last field goal try as a college player. The night before, his brother, the Herd's regular kicker, broke team rules and was suspended by Donnan for the title game. Brother Willie kicked it through for a 31-28 Marshall win. The Herd had risen from the ashes of that horrible plane crash in 1970 and won the university and the college town of Huntington a national championship. It was great theater. It remains a great story. But, without the playoff at the I-AA level, the college football world would have never known about Willie Merrick and the big step the Marshall program had made.
In my mind I've tried to inject the Carson-Newman and Marshall experiences into my current world. Imagine. In two or three years we've got us a bona fide playoff system for I-A football. Jim Grobe's surprising Deacs are the last team to make the playoff field. Nobody wants to play Wake Forest, because everybody knows that Jim Grobe teams are in just about every game they play in the fourth quarter and have a chance to win. Sure enough Wake Forest edges past its first two opponents.
You know the rest of the story. As the Deacs drown in the hysteria of a national football title, ABC's audience hears Steely Dan's mid-70's tune Deacon Blues (actual song for you youngsters) playing in the background. Could this be true? Could the same team that inspired the band's song because of the Deacs'one-time football futility really be national champion?
Not unless we get a playoff. Ask Carson-Newman or Marshall. Ask Auburn. Ask anybody. But keep asking.
Only then will we get satisfaction.
