James Laurinaitis and the Buckeyes are back in the title game despite losing one of their last two games, typically a deal breaker in any national championship resume. John Biever/SI

For a detailed look at the history and politics that helped shape the BCS, order Stewart Mandel's Bowls, Polls and Tattered Souls: Tackling the Chaos and Controversy that Reign Over College Football.

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"We'd love to still be playing against the best teams in the country," said Trojans coach Pete Carroll, whose team will instead face the 13th-best team in the country. "We'd love to see a playoff system that would allow us to do that. I can't imagine very many coaches that wouldn't."

Carroll said this, however, on a teleconference to promote the Rose Bowl, where just moments before and moments after, he espoused, "I love the tradition of the bowls. We love the Rose Bowl. ... We love playing a team from the Big Ten."

Well which is it, Pete? Are you more concerned with upholding tradition or more accurately determining the national champion?

"They're two totally different discussions," he said.

Actually ... no they're not.

Carroll's seemingly contradictory stances pretty much sum up the entire state of college football in 2007: We want our cake, but we want to eat it, too. We want to know who the No. 1 team is, but we also want to have a Rose Bowl, a Fiesta Bowl, a Sugar Bowl and an Orange Bowl.

For the past nine years, the BCS has done as commendable a job as possible accommodating both goals. Sure, there have been hiccups -- Florida State getting in the title game ahead of a Miami team it lost to (2000); Nebraska (2001) and Oklahoma ('03) finishing in the top two despite lopsided season-ending losses; Auburn finishing 12-0 with nowhere to go ('04) -- but for the most part, the teams and the public got the results they wanted, while the bowls continued to prosper.

If by chance you don't believe that, the BCS folks have the TV ratings and the ticket numbers to prove it.

"What we've done is increased the popularity of college football in every nook and cranny," said Slive. "This system provides us with an ability to couple a national championship game and provide other very compelling games."

Not this year.

One could rightfully argue that the BCS, for the first time, accomplished neither goal this season. Whichever team, Ohio State or LSU, wins the Jan. 7 title game, there will be a significant faction of the public that questions its legitimacy. If the Buckeyes win, it will be because the voters handed them an opponent that peaked in September. If the Tigers win, it will be because they were playing a team many never believed was any good to begin with.

Meanwhile, you'd be hard-pressed to find too many fans who would describe this year's other BCS matchups as "compelling."

Virginia Tech, No. 3 in the final BCS standings, is playing Kansas, the No. 2 team in the Big 12 North. No. 4 Oklahoma's reward for beating the No. 1 team in the country Saturday night (Missouri) is to face a West Virginia team that lost to 4-7 Pittsburgh the same night. No. 5 Georgia went from an anticipated title date with Ohio State in New Orleans to the undercard a week earlier against Hawaii. And do you think USC's Carroll, whose teams have made mincemeat out of their previous Big Ten Rose Bowl foes, is losing much sleep over those Illinois game tapes?

But you can't blame the bowls for most of those choices. In nearly every case, they were simply following selection protocol -- Pac-10 champ to the Rose Bowl, Big 12 champ to the Fiesta Bowl, ACC champ to the Orange Bowl, etc., etc.

There's only one realistic way to make the non-championship bowl games more meaningful: the proposed "plus-one" game. Listening to Slive's comments lately, it's starting to sound more and more imminent.

In answering a question Sunday night about whether or not the system "worked" in resolving this year's unusually cluttered championship race, Slive -- unsolicited -- pontificated about the potential impact of this season on future postseasons.

"In this year, being such a different kind of year -- with so many [different] teams in the No. 1 or 2 slot, so many teams with one or two losses -- I don't think that it's so much the system as it is the year," he said.. "What I find interesting about this year, as I think about [the] question, is, is this year an anomaly, or is this year a precursor to what we might see in the future?

"Trying to analyze that question leads us to the discussion we have had on numerous occasions about whether this [BCS] format needs an adjustment. It's a segue into looking at [a plus-one]. When we talked the other day, I asked the question, 'Is one and two enough?' It may be that this season, and this result may give us a hint towards the answer to that question."

Proponents of a an all-out playoff (it's not going to happen, so let's not bother going there) would presumably point out, correctly, that a plus-one -- which is essentially a four-team playoff -- would not go far enough in resolving this year's controversy, one that involved as many as seven legitimate candidates

But as I said earlier, it's hard to have sympathy for the "snubbed" teams when those teams have two losses. At least a plus-one would add two more teams -- in this case, No. 3 Virginia Tech and No. 4 Oklahoma -- into the mix.

Imagine, if you will, the potential bowl lineup if such a format existed. Right now, rather than lamenting the colossal letdown of this upcoming postseason, we'd be salivating over, say, an Ohio State-Oklahoma Fiesta Bowl and an LSU-Virginia Tech rematch in the Sugar Bowl -- with the added excitement of knowing two of those teams would meet each other the following week.

"We'd be encouraged by [a plus-one]," Fiesta Bowl CEO John Junker told me during an interview last year for Bowls, Polls and Tattered Souls. "We believe there is merit and value to a plus-one after the bowls."

When even the bowls themselves are calling for a change, you know there's something wrong with the system.

But you didn't need Junker to tell you that. You need only look at this year's BCS pairings.