With all due respect to Ohio State and LSU, if ever a season screamed for the BCS to be blown up, it's this one. But that won't happen until the folks at the Rose Bowl come to their senses

LSU made a huge leap in the rankings by beating Tennessee, while Ohio State moved up four spots without playing. Bill Frakes/SI

By Austin Murphy

It is only good manners, before we take a hydraulic jackhammer to this FUBAR Bowl Championship Series, to congratulate its biggest beneficiaries. Felicitations, Ohio State, for having the good sense to be idle last weekend, while No. 1 Missouri and No. 2 West Virginia were pratfalling their way out of the national title game. Don't take it personally, Buckeyes, if the rest of the country doesn't share your joy. People remember what happened last year when you made it to the game known as the 'Ship (Florida 41, OSU 14).

And hats off to you, LSU, for retaining the Hat -- coach Les Miles, he of the surgically attached Tigers ball cap. Miles looked to be Ann Arbor-bound until he declared two hours before the SEC title game in Atlanta that he wasn't going anywhere, then knocked off Tennessee 21-14. That win, coupled with the dual swoons of Mizzou and the Mountaineers, launched LSU's Bob Beamonesque leap from No. 7 to 1500 Poydras Street, a.k.a. the New Orleans Superdome.

Be patient, BCS loyalists counseled over the latter half of the season. This will all sort itself out. Instead, with the top two teams taking the pipe for the second straight week, the national championship picture took on all the clarity of an Etch A Sketch artist gone mad. Lining up for the coveted No. 2 slot, and the right to face the Buckeyes, were no fewer than seven squads with bona fide arguments. LSU, Oklahoma and Virginia Tech had just won their conference championship games. Georgia and USC are on fire. Kansas has but a single defeat, Hawaii none at all. The truth is, the 60 coaches in the USA Today poll and the 114 Harris poll voters, who slotted LSU into the title game (with help from the system's six computers), were all asked to do the same thing: take a wild guess. Right now, no one has the first clue as to who the two most deserving teams are.

There is only one way to find out, and it involves brackets -- either a 16-team playoff (not going to happen) or a "plus-one," in which the top four teams in the BCS would square off in semifinal games, and then the title game, or "plus-one," would kick off a week later. (Because of TV contracts, that probably won't happen before 2011.)

Since its inception in 1998, the BCS has delivered plenty of unfulfilling resolutions. But no season in its 10-year history has cried out so desperately for a playoff. SI's modest postseason proposal features an eight-team field and is a compromise between a four-team plus-one, which doesn't go far enough, and a 16-team bracket that would be too taxing -- not on the athletes but, rather, on the hearts of purists who contend that a playoff will sap the vitality from the regular season. The field would be determined using the final BCS rankings. The top four seeds would host first-round games. Three of the four BCS bowls would host the semifinals and the title game, and first-round losers would be slotted into other bowls. Now let's explain why, despite widespread appeal among fans, a playoff won't be coming to college football anytime soon.

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