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A mess from top to bottom College bowl setup answers few questions this year
There are three things you need to remember about the Bowl Championship Series. 1. A lot of people and a lot of computers put a lot of time and effort into determining "the best two teams in college football." The method of picking them is way more scientific than, say, what the coaches or the writers do. 2. This is the third season of the BCS and, by most non-biased accounts, it's worked pretty well so far. It has picked, without a whole lot of argument, "the best two teams in college football" to play in the national title game both times it's tried. 3. Woooo, they screwed it up this time around. Yeah, Miami got ripped off -- if you read the 1,000 or so e-mails that came my way last week, Washington did, too -- and now everybody's screaming. There aren't many, anywhere, who believe "the best two teams" will be playing for the national title this year. Heck, some think neither of the best two teams is playing. So the hollering begins. The BCS is a sham. College football needs something new. Something that will right the wrongs. Something that will give us -- finally! -- an undisputed, no-doubt-about-it national college football champ-een. You know. An honest-to-goodness playoff. Yeah. That'll happen. "I don't care what system you use," says Florida State coach Bobby Bowden , whose one-loss team is in the Orange Bowl despite losing to one-loss Miami, "somebody gets left out." Now Bowden, who coached the Seminoles to the national title last season and is appearing in his third straight national title championship game, can sling the BCS with the best of them. But leave it up to good ol' boy Bowden to hit this one on the head. Not everyone's going to be happy when it comes to picking who plays for a college football national championship, no matter what. Never have been. Never will be. For sure, that's easy for Bowden to say. He's the beneficiary of the BCS' computer burp. But if it weren't the Seminoles, there'd still be bellyaching. Miami? The Hurricanes lost to Washington. The Huskies? You see the schedule they played? Only five of their opponents finished with winning records, and two of them were 6-5. Yes, there are some problems with the way the BCS is figured. If anyone actually understood it, there might even be a few ideas about how to fix the thing. At the very least, the computers ought to factor in the head-to-head. But stay with us on this one. Nothing ever will be perfect. "If you pick two teams, the third team is upset. If you pick four, the fifth team is upset," Bowden says. "If you pick 16, you would have a legitimate gripe from No. 17." So while Miami cries foul and Washington goes absolutely nutty and college football fans all over try to figure out how to make the thing better, consider the case of poor Toledo. The Rockets won't be playing for the national title, granted, so the BCS doesn't really affect them. The Rockets, in fact, won't be playing anywhere. They are ranked No. 25 in both polls, 10-1 on the season, and not one of the 25 bowls could find a place for them. The Las Vegas Bowl -- the Las Vegas Bowl! -- decided on unranked Arkansas, a 6-5 team, instead. According to the Toledo Blade, 25 teams ranked lower than the Rockets will be playing this postseason. "If somebody out there can tell me how a 10-1 football team doesn't make a bowl game, other than it being a money issue, I'd love to hear why,'' tackle Jim Harding told the Blade. "If it is a money issue, why even have these bowl games if you're not going to have the best teams in them?'' And so, while the "best two teams in college football" slug it out Jan. 3 in South Florida -- or not -- Miami and Washington and anyone else out there who feels the snub ought to put themselves in Toledo's spikes. And, maybe, take some strange comfort in the fact that the whole college bowl system, from the BCS on down, is still way wide right of perfection. John Donovan is a senior writer for CNNSI.com. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer. Comments? To e-mail Donovan, click here.
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