With all due respect to my colleague and friend Devin Golden, he’s wrong about a college football playoff system.

“Where is college football’s Butler,” Golden asked in his column on Wednesday. I’ll tell you where they are: The Butler Bulldog football team finished 4-7 last season with losses to Youngstown State, San Diego, Campbell, Dayton, Morehead State, Jacksonville and Drake.

In his takedown of the controversial BCS selection formula, Golden lauds college basketball’s tournament as a model of fairness that college football should look to for inspiration. He fails to mention, though, that college basketball has its own computer ratings system that routinely leaves “deserving” teams out based on strength of schedule. The RPI is to college basketball what the BCS is to football. Ask Alabama fans about the RPI. The Tide defeated the Final Four bound Kentucky Wildcats in Tuscaloosa, beat tournament team Tennessee in Knoxville and dropped Georgia, who the NCAA selected over the Tide, twice in the last month of the regular season. Ask the Colorado Buffaloes, who beat tournament teams Texas, Kansas State (three times) and Missouri during the season how fair the RPI is.

And sure, VCU’s run has been nothing short of impressive. But the Rams probably shouldn’t have been in the tournament in the first place. VCU finished the regular season with a whopping 11 losses. The Rams lost to Old Dominion twice, Drexel, James Madison, Northeastern, South Florida and that model of college basketball success known as Georgia State. VCU was lucky to get in the play-in round after the NCAA expanded from 65 to 68 teams this season. The Rams would not have gotten in with the same resume in seasons past. Hello NIT bid.

We can argue the merits of the NCAA tournament selection process all day, but Golden’s main point was that the NCAA should follow a similar tournament format at the end of the football season.

An end-of-the-season tournament makes sense for college basketball because of the length of the season. With a 30-plus game season for most schools, you end up with several teams at the top with multiple losses most years. It would be nearly impossible to pick two teams to compete for a definitive national championship title. The much shorter college football season lends itself to the current BCS system better.

In college basketball a team like Butler can mess around and lose games to scrubs like Youngstown State, Valparaiso, UW-Milwaukee, Wright State and Evansville and still compete for a national title. The Bulldogs can afford to goof off during the season, losing to teams it ought to run out of the gym, and still compete for a national championship because of the leniency of the NCAA tournament selection process.

That simply would not work for football, and it would be a slap in the face of every serious team that works hard to stay perfect in the regular season. The BCS formula uses strength of schedule and computer ratings because those things matter in college football. In Auburn's 2010-11 national championship season, the Tigers won games against top 25 teams Mississippi State, South Carolina (twice), Arkansas, LSU and at Alabama. Auburn also had a non-conference game against Clemson. The conference schedules that teams like TCU and Boise State play are inferior, there is no way to argue against that.

Some advocates of a college football playoff say that a 16-team playoff, using the BCS rankings they love to hate, would be the most fair path to determine a college football champion. Using the final 2010 regular season BCS standings, released on Dec. 5, a three-loss Alabama team would have been the 16-seed in the proposed tournament. Does anyone, outside of the most delusional Alabama fans, believe that a team with three losses really deserves a chance to win a national championship? And the nine-seed Michigan State, who Alabama obliterated in the Capital One Bowl, deserves a shot at a title? Or Virginia Tech, a would-be 13 seed, with its loss to James Madison?

Others suggest that a 16-team playoff could feature the conference champions, plus at-large selections. In that case, does Big East champion UConn, with its 8-4 regular season record deserve a chance to win the national championship? Would MAC champion Miami (OH), with its 9-4 regular season record deserve a chance to slip up, get lucky and win a championship?

And in that scenario, who gets the at-large bids? What formula would fairly pick which teams get left out of the championship tournament?

And what about the bowls? Which bowl games get scrapped and which ones get to be a part of the new system?

What it all boils down to is America's love of the feel-good, squishy idea that everybody deserves what everybody else has. Didn’t win that crucial game against James Madison early in the season? That’s no problem Virginia Tech, you’ll get to play for a championship anyway! Couldn’t get past Les Miles and his goofy hat or couldn’t hold onto a huge lead against your biggest rival? Hey, don’t worry Bama, you’ll get your shot in the tournament. The same people who brought you the ever-expanding NCAA basketball tournament are trying to bring the same thing to college football. Throw tradition out the window. Forget about perfection and settle for mediocrity. Auburn, with its incredible run at the national championship last season, is no different than Alabama with three losses. Sunbelt champ Florida International's wins over UL-Lafayette, Arkansas State and Western Kentucky are the same as Auburn’s perfect SEC season.

That’s what would happen if we let this tournament stuff into college football. It is a sham, and we ought to call it such.

There are other options, like a plus-one game after the bowl season, that would be more reasonable and could do away with some of the BCS controversy. An Auburn-TCU showdown after the 2010-11 bowl season would have been a huge ratings draw. And I’m sure many fans would have welcomed an Alabama-Boise State game after the 2009-10 bowl season to determine the overall champ. An if-necessary plus-one game would be good when, after the bowl season, two teams with unbeaten or identical records finish in the BCS top two or three.

But a full-on, NCAA basketball style tournament would fundamentally change the face of the game forever.

Eric Mann is the Sports Coordinator for Gulf Coast Newspapers. Reach him by email at emann@gulfcoastnewspapers.com.