On the day before Election Day, Barack Obama, newly elected U.S. President, appeared on Monday-night football and spoke about how he would like to see the college football bowl format resemble that of the playoff format of professional sports.

"I think it's about time we had playoffs in college football,’’ Mr. Obama said. “I'm fed up with these computer rankings and this that and the other. Get eight teams -- the top eight teams -- right at the end. You got a playoff. Decide on a national champion."

What President Obama was referring to is the Bowl Championship Series (BCS), which is a system that was created in 1998 to make sure that the No.1 and No.2 teams played each other for the national championship. It is a complicated system that uses writers, coaches, and computerized polls, based on strength of schedule, to determine which two teams make the championship.

The problem with this system is that the national champion should be determined on the field rather than by the pollsters. Every champion in every other professional sport is determined by a playoff format. Playoff matchups are based on teams’ records during the regular season. If a team had the best record, for instance, then they would become the #1 seed and so on and so forth. This is how playoff matchups are determined. It is done this way in the National Football League, the National Hockey League, National Basketball League, Major League Baseball and United States Tennis Association. Without a playoff system, there is no clear champion.

The people against the playoff format argue that college football is unique in the way they do things based on polls, which gives the sport more attention since there are reasons to debate which team is No.1 and which teams should earn top Bowl seeds. But this argument doesn’t make sense since there will still be room for college football fans to debate the issue in that the top eight teams will probably be disputed as well. There will be plenty of arguments for fans to debate about the lower seeds. However, there is nothing to prevent using a playoff format and keep Bowl games for teams that don’t make it to the playoffs.

Oregon President David Frohnmayer, chair of the BCS Presidential Oversight Committee, disagreed with Obama’s suggestion. "We deeply respect the president-elect and we are glad that he is a fan of college football," Frohnmayer said in an e-mail response to ESPN. "We have the most compelling regular season in all of sports, and I'm sure that contributes to Senator Obama's enjoyment of our great game."

Many college football fans don’t want to change the bowl format since this is the way it’s been done for years and why change something that works? They claim that the regular season wouldn’t be as important if every loss could cost them a bowl appearance.
But as we all learned during President Obama’s campaign, change is how he won the election, and it is what is needed to improve a system that doesn’t work.