re: Does college basketball or football more accurately decide a champion?

Both systems are flawed for somewhat opposite reasons

College football to date has been flawed by an arbitrary process in which different rules are applied to different teams with better or lesser names. Before the BCS even a consensus top two teams had no guarantees of playing each other in their bowl game. The upcoming four team playoff system has yet to reveal a set of objective rules which would be the same from year to year and for team to team to clean this up.

College basketball includes everyone with a pulse but they include so many teams that the element of chance becomes too overwhelming. If you cared about declaring a champion on the basis of the sum of your qualifications and quality of your year and your team in total you should be dissatisfied with this outcome. Basketball is about matchups and you can be the better team, have an off night against a team that is really not to be considered an elite team but matches up well, and eliminates you with no recourse. A lot of people would argue that is "fair" that at least everyone "has a chance" but I think that's incompletely true. Getting unlucky with your bracket opponents can be very unfair and becomes more likely to be unfair to more good teams the more surplus teams you invite.