We took a poll last year and 90% of our readers said that the BCS should be trashed in favor of a playoff system. It takes guts (or something) to stand up against that kind of popular opinion, and Kansas City Star columnist Jason Whitlock is the latest to take up the mantle, using President-elect Barack Obama’s pro-playoff stance as a starting point.

Like I did with similar arguments from Tim Cowlishaw and John Walters, let me respond to Whitlock point-by-point…

I realize I’m one of just a handful of American men unpleased by Obama using the weight of the presidency to pressure college presidents to disband the BCS. He knows this, too. It’s probably pretty much all he really knows about big-time college football. Fans — Republican, Democrat and Libertarian — are dissatisfied with the current system. There’s virtually no risk in bashing the BCS.

Why is that? I’m not one to argue that the majority is always right, but when 90% of the populace agrees on something, we should probably go ahead and give it a try.

President-elect Obama doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about, and he diminishes his high office and invites other politicians to join him by foolishly entering a debate that has life only because “Joe the Sports Writer/Broadcaster� can’t wrap his brain around sports issues of substance.

Now Whitlock claims that anyone that is pro-playoff “can’t wrap his brain around sports issues of substance.” Mind you, he hasn’t yet made an actual point, but he is already declaring that anyone who doesn’t agree with him just simply isn’t as smart as he is.

Yeah, by lending his name to this non-issue, Obama has pleased every Bubba in America and pretty much ensured that big-time college football will continue an escalation toward professionalism and exploitation of “amateur� athletes.

Okay, here’s the big windup…

Let me quickly repeat the argument I introduced in the mid-1990s:

Division I-A college football has the greatest regular season in all team sports, and a playoff system would ruin that distinction. For decades, coaches and players focused on winning conference championships and were quite satisfied with a “mythical� national championship decided by poll voters. The advent of ESPN and sports-talk radio created the fallacy that the lack of a playoff system scars athletes, fans, women and children, contributes to global terrorism and delays Santa Claus’ delivery run on Christmas Eve.

There’s nothing wrong with college football on the field. It is America’s healthiest sport in terms of consistent entertainment value. This is not even remotely debatable.

So Whitlock’s argument is that the college football regular season is perfect as is, and that it was sports-talk radio that created a “fallacy” that the sport needs a playoff. Assuming this is correct, sports-talk radio was successful in convincing 90% of college football fans that the current system – the very system they were supposedly “fans” of – was broken. Wow, sports-talk radio must be really powerful. How often do 90% of Americans agree on anything?

He also declares that it is “not remotely debatable” to say that any other sport is as consistently entertaining as college football. I know a few million NFL fans that would beg to differ.

There’s a lot wrong with college athletics. Many football and basketball players are funneled through the system without receiving much of an education. Coaches and administrators are paid salaries that invite questionable ethics. Too many athletes arrive on campus completely unprepared to be educated and solely interested in the development of their bodies. The use of performance-enhancing drugs is out of control within most athletic departments.

These and other issues are worthy of discussion at the presidential level.

Who’s No. 1? How to set up an eight-team playoff format?

Leave that to the idiots.

This is a classic debate tool. Distract from the real issue by making points that almost everyone can agree with and then act like you’ve won the argument. Just because there are other issues to deal with in collegiate athletics, it doesn’t mean that Obama shouldn’t help to facilitate something that 90% of college football fans want to see.

He didn’t say why a playoff would ruin the regular season, he just stated that it would, as if it were a fact.

I guess that’s just one of those “sports issues of substance” that we mere mortals just can’t wrap our brains around. Jason Whitlock says he knows best, and therefore he must.

NBCSports.com John Walters chimes in with a lame argument in favor of the BCS. Walters is a little different from the other BCS-apologists out there in that he framed his pitch as an open letter to President-elect Barack Obama, who recently reiterated his support for a college football playoff. Whenever I read these pro-BCS arguments, I feel compelled to pick them apart point by point (like I did with Tim Cowlishaw two weeks ago).

I will begin with my most ardent point (we’ll call it Item 1): The beauty of the alchemy of the unknown. College football offers unforeseen plot twists and turns each Saturday. It is a fragile yet fertile ecosystem, something that man could not knowingly create yet, now that it exists in its present form, he can appreciate. To attempt to “fix it” would no less befoul the college gridiron landscape than would unregulated drilling in Alaska.

So instituting a playoff would automatically ruin the “alchemy of the unknown”? What does that mean? Even with a playoff, college football will still offer unforeseen plot twists and turns each Saturday, just like the NFL does each Sunday.

It’s always funny when commentators wax poetic about the uniqueness of the college football championship format. They mention qualities (that would not suddenly go away with a playoff) as reasons to keep a bad system.

In his recent column, “BCS system, not playoffs, is best for college football,” Dallas Morning News columnist Tim Cowlishaw is the latest to side with the BCS-apologist crowd.

Let’s take his points one by one…

The overriding point playoff supporters miss is that a playoff changes everything. There’s nothing neat and tidy about an eight-team playoff.

Damn right it changes everything, and that’s a very, very good thing. No one said that an eight-team playoff would be neat and tidy. It just needs to be neater and tidier than the current system, and that’s not hard to do.

If you take the six big conference winners and use some sort of formula or committee similar to the NCAA basketball tournaments to select the two at-large spots, how does that work? Does the team perceived to be the best of the nonBCS schools automatically get a selection?

If so, that leaves only one at-large berth to a runner-up.

Cowlishaw invokes the NCAA basketball tournament, then flies off on a BCS school tangent. I don’t know that each BCS conference has to be represented, but if such a rule were to exist, what’s wrong with only one or two runner-ups getting bids? Second place finishers in BCS conferences had their chance to make the playoffs and they couldn’t even win their own conference. Having one or two at-large bids for runners-up is actually a good thing, because it will “keep hope alive” for those teams that lose early or fall behind in the conference race. You take the one or two best runners-up, and you’ve got your field of eight.

One common argument from BCS-apologists is that there is no perfect way to create that eight-team field. There will always be arguments why the #9, #10 or #11 teams should have made it. March Madness is set up in the same way, and while there is always some debate on Selection Sunday, it dies down quickly because everyone knows that those teams that didn’t make the field don’t have a legitimate argument that they are the best team in the nation. Yeah, maybe they should have made it over Team X or Team Y, but did they really have a shot to win the title? Of course not. The same goes for football, where the chances are slim that the ninth-, tenth- or eleventh-best team in the nation really has a legit shot to win three games against the best teams in the land.

To avoid these kinds of questions, you have to go to a 16-team tournament and at that point, the regular season has lost its unique quality. If that many teams are postseason bound, then you completely alter the emotions that spilled out of Texas and Texas Tech fans in the final dramatic plays late Saturday night.

I still can’t get my head around this whole “the regular season will become less important/dramatic” argument. If there are more spots available for the postseason that means there will be more teams in a position to vie for those spots which means that the intensity and drama (on the whole) will increase, not decrease. Even if we assume that the drama surrounding the Texas/Texas Tech rivalry would be diminished with an 8- or 16-team playoff – and that’s a big assumption – what about the increase in drama surrounding the other 10 or 15 teams that have a shot to make the playoffs? What’s the net effect on the sport? Sure, you can throw out one example of a game that will have less importance, but what about the seven or eight other games that become more important because there’s a more inclusive playoff system in place?

College football is different from every other sport in that it doesn’t always provide a bow on a neatly tied package at the end of the year.

I will gladly sacrifice that in order to maintain the integrity of autumn Saturday afternoons and nights. Those are nothing less than the best days in sport.

He’s assuming that a playoff would ruin “the integrity” of the regular season. Look at the NFL, is the regular season a bore? No, every week is important yet the playoffs are inclusive enough that heading down the home stretch, there are a number of teams that are still in the hunt. This increases the interest and the drama.

And then there’s the “neatly tied package” comment. There’s a reason that every other major sport ends in a playoff…

IT’S THE BEST WAY TO DECIDE A CHAMPION!