BCS Mess Is Best Thing For College Football

The BCS National Championship Game is set: Oklahoma vs. Florida in the Orange Bowl on January 8. (Yes, it's ridiculous we have to wait a full week from the traditional end of the college football season, but that's for another blog).

Teams that are officially in full meltdown mode Monday morning because they weren't selected: Texas, Southern Cal and Utah. (Because the Utes know that even if they go undefeated in the Mountain West Conference and have seven straight bowl wins, they are ineligible from the start to play for the national title)

The Bowl Championship Series is designed to fail from the start.

The process that picks two teams - based on human polls and computer rankings - only works if you have two undefeated teams that are high profile from major conferences. If you have three teams or one that are perfect, it doesn't work.

The 2008 season has proven you won't get two once-beaten high profile teams from major conferences.

Now I could point out the problems of trying to claim that this system can identify the two best teams out of a pool, but such a system doesn't exist.

I do want to mention that Oklahoma appears to have been given a pass by the national media (i.e. The ESPN Gameday crew) when it comes to post-season failures. Ohio State gets pounded as a fraud, but everyone has forgotten that the Sooners have lost four of their last five bowl games.

OU lost to Boise State and was drubbed by West Virginia over the past two seasons. And in their BCS National Championship games the Sooners lost to LSU 21-14 (2003) before a 55-19 humiliation to Southern Cal a year later.

However, the BCS is good for the sport. It makes every weekend of the regular season count for something down the road. The arguments being waged in chat rooms, on those ESPN sportswriters yelling at each other shows (I believe that makes up 73% of the network's broadcast schedule) and bars is good for the sport.

There are still people arguing that Penn State should have been 1994 National Champions instead of Nebraska.

March Madness is the better way to determine a champion. A total of 65 teams playing it out on the court, but I can tell you that the tournament makes most of college basketball's regular season meaningless. It's just four-plus months of games to decide seeding in a neutral court tournament.

And I can also tell you that by Tuesday afternoon back in April - the day after the National Championship game - no one was talking about the game between Kansas and Memphis...outside of Kansas and Memphis.

Most of Tennessee was still wondering when the Volunteers would finally get rid of Phil Fulmer.

You'll see tons of sports media types laying out their plans for how a football playoff could be held, just as it is at every other level of NCAA athletics. But ESPN just paid big money - well, not federal bailout big money - but plenty of cash to keep this BCS system going until 2014 at the earliest.

And you know another deal will be in place to give the BCS life beyond 2014 well before 2014.

So accept that this is how college football picks a champion and learn to live with it. Don't try to rationalize it or explain it to people not familiar with the system.

If the BCS was such a great system for picking a title game, other sports would use it.

They don't, but that changes nothing.