It's a head-shaker to a lot of people, all right. Especially folks in Colorado and Oregon.

"I understand that frustration," said the man in charge of the BCS, Atlantic Coast Conference commissioner John Swofford. "I'm sure if I was at either of those schools I would feel the same way.

"[But] the reason we have the [BCS] formula is to distinguish between those teams. And what the formula kicked out was Nebraska."

Colorado coach Gary Barnett is livid. He's hot that a team Colorado beat by 26 points (62-36), a team that finished behind Colorado in the Big 12 North, leapfrogged his team into the championship game.

But, you know, what he really should be hot about is this:

Himself. His team.

Colorado lost to Fresno State, for crying out loud, in its opener. The Buffaloes lost six weeks later to Texas, 41-7. That's two losses.

You want outrage? A team with two losses playing for a national championship would be outrageous.

If there's a legitimate gripe, it belongs to Oregon. The Ducks have one loss (to Stanford, 49-42). The coaches and writers voted them No. 2, ahead of both Colorado and Nebraska. The Ducks won the Pac-10.

But the best they can hope for is a split of the title, and that can happen only if they beat Colorado in the Fiesta Bowl and Nebraska beats Miami in the Rose Bowl.

When the announcement came Sunday that Nebraska was in the title game, Oregon coach Mike Bellotti was stunned. Even worse.

"I was gunshot," he said. "I liken the BCS to a bad disease, like cancer. Not to take anything away from Nebraska or Colorado -- they're great football teams -- but one has two losses and the other didn't win their conference championship."

Ah, but Oregon has its faults, too. A weak schedule (the Ducks' schedule was ranked 31st largely because of some bad years by teams like UCLA and Oregon State) and a lack of quality wins cost them big time.

And so it comes back to Nebraska, arguably the best one-loss team left.

"When you're 11-1 and you’ve played as strong a schedule as Nebraska has played and there is only one undefeated team," Swofford said, "you have a good shot at being the No. 2 team."

Next year, the BCS lords may tweak the formula again, as they did before this season when they gave more weight to quality wins. A lot of teams -- one in Colorado and one in Oregon, for sure -- want to give more credit to conference winners. But for now, it's all cut and dried, in that arcane BCS kind of way.

It's funny -- except if you're in Colorado or Oregon -- that with all its fumbling around, with all those goofy polls and strength of schedules and quality wins stuff, the BCS got the two most deserving teams in the title game anyway.

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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