It’s hard to knock TCU and what they have done this year but for Boise St., as the article suggests, is asked to score “style” points along with their wins in order to be taken serious. I haven’t seen the BCS poll yet but obviously Iowa should drop behind Boise St. A coworker last week, prior to the poll, thought colusion would put Oregon ahead of Boise. That article I posted sums it up pretty good: “all Boise St. can do is win” and let the chips fall where they may.
Well, Oregon will have a reserved spot, but it would be almost impossible to get Oregon into a better bowl. I was looking at something happening like (for instance) SEC champ v. Texas, Cincinnati v. Boise St., Penn St. v. Oregon, Georgia Tech. vs. SEC runner-up and bye-bye TCU., which would have outraged sportswriters (the very same who will have voted for the SEC runner-up, by the way) turning 18 colors of purple that the SEC runner-up is in, and TCU is out.
And you know what? The only way a playoff would include TCU would be to give automatic spots to the lesser conferences. But that would leave the SEC runner-up with an argument to be #1, unless the SEC winner, or the team that beat the SEC winner was the overall champion.
The simple matter is this: no playoff system can fairly pick the winner of 120+ teams after only 11 games. Things were better when it was simply the Rose bowl, the Orange Bowl, the Cotton Bowl, etc., and people fought it out about whether the Pac-10 was better than the ACC.