That's the ageless lament. But too many people lose sight of the fact that this is not a professional league, it's a university association. The athletes are supposed to be STUDENT-athletes, not professional athletes. There are about 130 NCAA Division 1 schools, and each team plays 12-13 games apiece.
And what's to stop Div 2 and Div 3 schools with teams that have goo-or-perfect records putting their hands up and saying, hey, we wanna be in the BCS playoffs too, just like the NCAA basketball tournament? Alas, basketball is one sport, and football entirely another. You cannot expect student-athletes to have a fixture list equal to the professional NFL.
Even if we were to restrict a tournament to the Div 1 schools, the number of schools and conference schedules makes a playoff system difficult and unwieldy. And it certainly doesn't do much for a student's higher education, which is the object of the institution in the first place. Unfortunately, NCAA sports have become such a major priority that it's a farce some of these athletes were even permitted to be students. We have seen universities award scholarships and graduate "students" like Dexter Manley -- who had the functional literacy of an 8 year old (ie. illiterate). These players are supposed to be students first; and the really good players understand that, which is why they are so quick to pull the trigger and leave their program the second they become eligible for a professional draft. The NCAA is more interested in the recruitment and scholarship abuses in their athletic programs -- which always hurt the integrity of academic institutions far more than they hurt athletic programs -- and that's a far more important priority to them than BCS playoffs.
