TCU and Boise State are unworthy of National Championship consideration, Ohio State President E. Gordon Gee said this week.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Gee said TCU and Boise St. don’t deserve to play for the National Championship because their schedules aren’t as demanding as the schools that play in BCS conferences.

 

Officials at OSU said he was unavailable to comment Wednesday.

“Well, I don’t know enough about the Xs and Os of college football,” Gee said. “I do know, having been both a Southeastern Conference president and a Big Ten president, that it’s like murderer’s row every week for these schools. We do not play the Little Sisters of the Poor. We play very fine schools on any given day. So I think until a university runs through that gauntlet that there’s some reason to believe that they not be the best teams to (be) in the big ballgame.”

Gee has continued to be an ardent supporter of the BCS system. He said he’s against instituting a playoff format in college football.

“If you put a gun to my head and said, ‘What are you going to do about a playoff system (if) the BCS system as it now exists goes away?’ I would vote immediately to go back to the bowl system,” he said.

Gee’s position on the BCS and a potential playoff system has gone unchanged since he spoke with Lantern editors in October 2009.

“I’ll say it again — over my dead body,” Gee said in a meeting with the newspaper’s staff. “Mark that down — we will not have a playoff in this era — period.”

Gee said replacing the BCS system with a playoff would make money the top priority of bowl games, not the opportunities for athletes.

“It’s all a slippery slope toward professionalization,” Gee told Lantern editors in April. “It’s all about money. It’s not about the student-athlete.”

Regardless of whether Boise St. (10-0) and TCU (11-0) deserve to be in the National Championship game has been a hotly debated topic in college football circles this season. TCU and Boise St. are both undefeated and sit at No. 3 and No.4 respectively in the BCS rankings.

Gee said the Buckeyes are ranked in the top 10 in both the BCS rankings and in their academic achievements.

“That’s the kind of balance I want to have,” Gee said.

Officials from the TCU athletic department were unavailable to comment. The Boise St. athletic department declined to comment for this story.