A Stopped Clock

It is said that even a stopped clock is right twice a day and so it is with the Bowl Championship Series as well. The fact that it worked out this year as the strong consensus number one and number two teams are playing in the national championship game doesn’t mean the BCS is a perfect system or even the right system. It’s just a jerry-rigged fix that gets it right once in awhile.

I’ve railed against the BCS in the past because of what it is and what it isn’t. My point is simple. Either go back to the way things used to be or go to a full-blown playoff. This middling approach causes middling results.

Maybe the BCS is the best that can be done. That’s because a playoff system, whatever merit it might have, is far more of a problem then most people believe, suggesting that the BCS is with us like a crazy aunt. The current bowl system, the real impediment to a playoff, is far more intertwined into the fabric of Division I college football than most people appreciate. It’s easy for the media to take an etch-a-sketch approach to damn near anything. You don’t like what the current picture looks like? Just shake and start over, simple as that.

Well, it’s not that simple.

According to a report on ESPN.com, at a recent IMG Intercollegiate Forum that featured a lengthy discussion among the athletic directors of the major conferences, a healthy debate ensued on the merits of the current BCS system. Lest anyone think that there isn’t a case to be made for the current system, they should listen to what Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany had to say.

Delany makes the obvious but important point that much of the debate starts from the premise that teams and fans alike are conditioned to think about playoffs. Indeed, playoffs are the fabric of virtually every sports league from 8-year old T-ball to the NFL. Thus, the natural inclination is that the only way to arrive at a true national champ is through a grinding system of post-season games that leads to a winner take all final.

It’s way too late to try to condition fans otherwise but Delany’s point, subtly made, is that no one stops to consider challenging the conventional wisdom of the underlying premise. You could dissect the playoffs in virtually any sport and find an unworthy champ. It’s often the case that teams with the best regular season record don’t end up winning it all for any number of reasons.

So it is a valid point to make that even a playoff system doesn’t necessarily do any more to guarantee the “right” team was crowned national champ. But the counter to it is that when it comes to NCAA football, where the disparity between conferences can be far more dramatic than the disparity between divisions in professional sports, there is a better chance that the theoretical “right” team will be the national champ after being tested through a playoff system.

But the far more salient point that Delany makes is to point out the difficulties inherent in a playoff system given the current bowl system and conference affiliations. Those who scoff at these as mere parochial concerns really do miss the larger issues.

As Delany notes, the automatic bowl bid conferences like the PAC 10 and Big 10 gave up some of their access to, for example, the Rose Bowl, traditionally the most lucrative bowl game of all, in order to serve the greater good which, in this case, means teams from lesser conferences like the Mountain West, which is sending TCU to the Rose Bowl this season against Wisconsin.

Whatever else you might think about TCU and the level of competition it plays, no one much argues that a Wisconsin vs. Stanford Rose Bowl would be a far more desirable match up from just about every angle. In the context of college sports, the sacrifice that the Big 10 and the PAC 10 made in order to allow the Wisconsin v. TCU game to happen instead is significantly underappreciated by the playoff advocates.

Stated differently, as Delany points out, a playoff system of virtually any configuration comes at the expense and financial sacrifice of the schools at the top for the benefit of the middling schools and conferences, like the Mountain West and the Big East, who give up virtually nothing.

It may all be just money, but it’s real money you’re taking out of one school’s or one conference’s pocket to put into the pockets of lesser schools or conferences. In a different context, say a tax increase for millionaires to provide more benefits for the poor, we’d rail against it as a socialistic redistribution of wealth. But since it’s football, this is all just fine.

Another point that Delany doesn’t much get into but is still worth noting is the premise that a playoff system creates even greater wealth for everyone. Yet I’ve not seen one model, one study, one proposal from one network that actually supports this premise.

The working assumption is that there is no limit on the money that the networks will spend for the rights to televise NCAA playoff football. That simply isn’t true. More to the point, whatever money the networks would spend would eventually impact what amount, if any, they’d be willing to pay for all of those minor bowl games featuring teams not good enough to make the playoffs.

And before you say good riddance to those bowl games, remember that these lesser teams are never going to give up those opportunities. If nothing else, it gives them more weeks of practice, giving them a head start on the next season.

If you don’t think, for example, that the Michigan Wolverines suffered some the past two seasons because they weren’t bowl eligible the previous year, you aren’t paying attention. That extra game and those extra practices are akin to an early start on spring football.

What really emerges from this entire debate is that the true advocates for the BCS, meaning those colleges with the most to lose economically through a more democratic playoff system, actually have a point. I suspect they understand that the BCS isn’t perfect or even very good. It’s as if they’re trying to scratch an itch knowing that the back scratcher isn’t quite long enough to reach the whole problem.

There are some that predict a regular playoff season within 5 years and they may be right. But every playoff proposal that someone has concocted has the same thing at its core: forcing the big schools to forego the potential millions that their current bowl affiliations tend to yield. That is why virtually every playoff proposal has been dead on arrival.

These big schools, be it Ohio State, USC, Oklahoma, or Alabama, have budgets they need to balance and that isn’t going to happen if their most lucrative sport, football, is put in a position of potentially foregoing millions just so that the occasional TCU or Boise State can run with the big boys for a few years.

No one seems to relish a return to the old days and the chance that there might be disputed national champs based on the vagaries of pollsters. Fine. But if a playoff system is going to happen, it won’t be until someone steps forward with a proposal that addresses the big schools fundamental interest. They aren’t going to go along until they are compensated for the sacrifices that are being asked to make. Since no one has come forward with that kind of proposal, we all better just get used to this do-loop of bitching every December about the stopped clock that is the BCS and get comfortable that at least every once in awhile it gets it right.

Lingering Items--Annual Traditions Edition

Let’s see, it’s the second week of December and that can only mean one thing: the various BCS bowl matchups have been announced. Actually, it also means another thing: time for my yearly rant about the BCS.

To recap for those just joining our programming, everything that’s right about college football played at the highest level is undercut by the ridiculous thinking behind the Bowl Championship Series, from it’s completing misleading nameplate to it’s completing misleading mission. Ostensibly designed to yield an undisputed national champion, all it does is create more disputes than it resolves.

It may be that the BCS more or less got the match ups right this season, but that does nothing to justify its ill-conceived existence. The fact is that both TCU and Boise State, paired against each other coincidentally enough in the Fiesta Bowl, were essentially bought off with millions of dollars in order to keep their big mouths shut. It’s what the BCS does when it has a problem—papers over it with money. If that doesn’t work, it hires a consultant.

The BCS is on a slow but steady trip toward obsolescence. Congress is now involved and despite public perception that the only thing Congress ever does is spend your tax money unwisely, institutions tend to get their panties in a twist every time Congress sticks its nose in their business.

BCS defenders will do their best to fend off Congressional inquiries with the argument that Congress should have better things to worry about ignoring the fact that this little recreational diversion is a multi-multi million dollar business.

This is all well and good but what ultimately will do the BCS in is the convergence of greed and stupidity. I can’t wait.

The greed involved comes in many forms, nearly most of which do nothing for the actual players involved save for the little trinkets they get for participating. As you’d expect, there’s a NCAA rule on it which limits the value of those trinkets to $500. Of course, if you’re not in any sort of bowl game, like a Michigan player for example, getting those same sorts of trinkets from a booster will cause you to lose your eligibility.

The BCS is about the money, but not for the also-rans. The de facto Super Conference made up of the 15 or so programs (at most) that can actually compete for a championship get the spoils; the rest of Division I, not so much. This money helps fill the increasingly larger holes in the college budgets, holes that were there because of the cost of the programs in the first place but deepened because of the economic crisis.


In a perfect world the riches the BCS promises would incent more colleges to make themselves BCS-bowl worthy. And in some sense that’s worked. But the cost of fielding a program that can legitimately compete for a national championship in Division I football has grown, for most schools, far more quickly than the revenue side of their operations.

Indeed, the rising tide of BCS bowls has actually had the inverse affect on non-BCS participants. The “other” bowls became even more irrelevant, substantively and financially. There is less advertising dollars dedicated to those bowls, particularly now, and the crowds are dwindling. The BCS, designed supposedly to respect the integrity of the existing bowls, has basically protected the integrity of a handful of bowls and thrown the rest under the proverbial bus. Let me know how that Eaglebank Bowl works out.

Sooner or later an uprising of college presidents on the short end of the BCS stick will get wise to the suckers they’ve been played for by those dining on caviar. That tide will turn soon enough.

Also giving it a rather big push will be the incredibly flawed way that BCS participants are chosen. This may be the even bigger con. Each year the system gets tweaked but ultimately it’s weighted heavily toward human opinion in the form of various polls voted on either by coaches or the media. The underlying assumption in these polls is that the underlying task will be taken seriously by its participants. Says who?

How many media members or coaches have actually seen enough games played by either TCU or Boise State to have an informed opinion on their body of work or have an understanding of the relative weakness of their competition each week? Miami is in the top 20 but how many have really watched them play? Not to pick on the Cincinnati Bearcats, but they gave up 44 points to Pittsburgh and have given up an average of nearly 40 points in each of their last 4 games and they are in the top 5. Is it simply because they’ve won irrespective of the weakness of its conference or its defense this year? And that’s just four teams off the top of my head.

If you want an illustration of what really happens, consider the outcome of the final week of the USA Today’s coaches poll. On Steve Spurrier’s ballot this past week, he or the sports information director at South Carolina on his behalf, voted Penn State 9th, Iowa 10th and Ohio State 11th. That just proves they either aren’t paying attention or just aren’t taking it seriously. Other similar flaws can be found throughout.

While Spurrier’s vote was mostly irrelevant to the outcome it underscores an incredible problem. If one supposedly highly-respected coach or his sports information director can’t even be relied upon to get the big things right how can anyone have any trust that the little things are right? I put it to you, Dean Wormer, doesn’t that in turn undermine the integrity of the entire system?

If the goal in this country is to have an undisputed national champion then of course a playoff system is the only alternative. First things first, let’s reach consensus that establishing an undisputed champion is even a worthy goal. College presidents can’t claim that a playoff system isn’t in the academic best interests of the players but somehow justify the BCS as a worthy pursuit.

But if the BCS is to persist it ultimately can’t exist in its present form but must be the culmination of an actual, credible playoff system. And it’s not that hard to figure out despite what the BCS-hired twitter gurus will try to tell you. Put it this way, every college involve prides itself first on its research capabilities. Certainly an institution able to make headway in the field of molecular biology can find some frat kid with a little time on his hands to draw up a bracket using Google Docs.

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What’s turning into another annual holiday tradition is the voting results of the Baseball Hall of Fame’s veteran’s committee. Revamped last year, the purpose is to honor veterans whom the media did not otherwise feel were Hall worthy during their initial period of eligibility.

This year the Veterans Committee elected former St. Louis Cardinals manager Whitey Herzog and former umpire Doug Harvey. That’s all well and good. Even better, though, is that once again Marvin Miller is on the outside looking in, though he’s inching closer.

Miller fell two short votes for election and if Hall voting has proven anything it’s that just having your name hang around for enough years eventually gets you in. It’s as if these borderline candidates are being rewarded for their persistence, even in retirement.

Let’s hope Miller proves to be the exception to the rule. The passage of time will never adequately erase the memory of how his strident views and Oz-like persona combined to nearly ruin the game. His is a legacy that continues today.

It’s because of Miller that baseball still doesn’t have a salary cap and is divided into haves and have nots. The economic problems facing baseball are so vast and the union’s contributions under Miller and his progeny to solving them so slim that baseball remains on the brink of killing its own golden goose.

I’ll give Miller credit for being a tough advocate on behalf of his clients but that singular skill doesn’t erase the fact that he never worked for the betterment of the game itself. He always saw baseball in relative terms and could have cared less about its long term health.

Miller certainly had a profound impact on the game, but then so too did the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and as far as I know the Veterans Committee hasn’t ever once considered enshrining former Japanese premier Hideki Tojo into the Hall of Fame. The same should go for Miller.

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Speaking of baseball’s annual pre-holiday “winter” meetings, the news on Tuesday that the Indians are shopping closer Kerry Wood may have been expected but that has nothing to do with general manager Mark Shapiro’s talent judgments. The issues are larger and relate, as most things economic do, to the aforementioned Miller.

Ostensibly the Indians are shopping Wood because he doesn’t fit into their plans. It’s the same half-truth that accompanies the phrase “I’m not looking to get into a relationship right now.” Since when doesn’t a closer figure into any team’s plans?

Of course, what Shapiro really means is that this particular closer with his particular salary, like that particular girl with that particular mole on his nose, doesn’t fit into his plans. That’s a very loud and truthful statement on the state of baseball economics.

The Indians don’t have another established closer on their roster but are more than willing to go it without one because it’s far cheaper. They know there is no realistic chance for this team to be competitive so why not be uncompetitive at a cheaper price? If you or I were paying the bills you can be damn sure we’d think the same way.

There is always the potential that someone like Jensen Lewis, given the opportunity without having to worry about Wood sitting in the bullpen, can establish himself. That’s the pie-in-the-sky upside. But this move isn’t about Lewis, it’s about a payroll the Indians can no longer afford.

This illustrates precisely why baseball is such a mess. With no salary cap and no meaningful revenue sharing, teams like the Indians do not have any meaningful chance to compete with teams like New York and Boston on a yearly basis. They must rely solely on luck, as in most of their young roster getting good at around the same time and before they’re eligible for either arbitration or free agency. Once in awhile it works. But year in and year out it doesn’t.

Wood, like Victor Martinez, C.C. Sabathia and Cliff Lee before him, is a “luxury” that bottom feeder teams like Cleveland can’t afford. It’s fun to have champagne tastes but the Indians have a beer budget and with that even a slightly lesser label like Wood is out of their reach.

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Nothing on the Cleveland Browns? Ha. This week’s question to ponder: Did the NFL purposely schedule this week’s game against Pittsburgh on Thursday knowing that the NFL Network is still unavailable to a large part of the country?

Suffering Through the BCS

There is a new champion in college football and hardly anyone outside of Gainesville, Florida seems all that thrilled about it.

Certainly there is always going to be a little jealousy creeping in anytime someone other than your favorite team wins something of consequence. Thus a little bashing of the Florida Gators, or whoever else might have found themselves in their position, is expected. But this season, just as the season before it and the season before that, the din has grown louder for a playoff system for Division I football. And this season, just as the season before it and the season before that, the folks who bring about the Bowl Championship Series could care less about your concerns.

What most people forget, however, is that Division I already has a playoff system so arguing about creating one is misplaced. The real problem that never gets articulated is that the current playoff system is too restrictive. It’s basically a two-team playoff with those teams picked by a confusing amalgamation of polls.

At some point, the critics of the BCS will get their way. In the current economic environment almost anything that at one time seemed unimaginable is likely to happen. It is easy to envision a collapse of the sacred bowl system on a purely fiscal basis, which would eliminate the major obstacle to a more expansive playoff. But even if that doesn’t happen, eventually those who really control sports in this country, the broadcast networks, will force a comprehensive playoff system on the naysayers and protectionists that refuse to budge to logic and reason.

But until that happens, the best way to fix the BCS is to simply abolish it. On pure merits, a one game playoff will always yield far more controversy than it will solve. There simply is no way to satisfy the number of teams with a claim on one of two slots and far too many variations and lack of comparators to ever insure that those voting in these polls will get the top two teams correct.

This season is instructive but nearly any season in the past 10 would do. To my eyes, USC was the best team I’ve seen this season. I understand they lost to Oregon State, which lost to Penn State. I understand, too, that their head coach, Pete Carroll, keeps finding a way to underprepare his team at least once a season which leads to them being on the outside looking in more often than not. But having watched USC dismantle both Penn State and Ohio State this season, it was easy to see that this is a team with far more talent from top to bottom and side to side than any other team in the country.

Maybe you’re one of those that believe that wins against Big Ten teams are meaningless. But having watched Ohio State do everything right but win against, first Penn State and then a Texas team that was far more highly ranked convinced me that Ohio State wasn’t nearly the patsy that many believed.

The SEC had their share of good teams, including the national champion, again this year. Florida is clearly a very good team. But is it just another good team made better because of the presence of college football’s best player, Tim Tebow? Oklahoma seemed unstoppable heading into the game with Florida, despite its one loss. But a team averaging 50 points a game or more for a good part of the season couldn’t get more than 14 on Thursday night. Florida, too, was having its way with every team prior to Oklahoma, almost scoring at will against them, and yet only managed 24 points against a highly suspect Oklahoma defense.

And let’s not forget about Utah. They dominated Alabama, a number one team for a healthy part of the season.

The point, though, is not to trash any of these teams or to argue against Florida this year. It’s simply to note that the outcome of the Florida-Oklahoma game solved nothing. Florida is still a one-loss team, just like USC and Texas. Utah is still undefeated. Each has a legitimate argument for why it’s better than the other, even if you don’t share their viewpoint.

It’s not as if anyone outside of those with a vested interest in the BCS system thought that the outcome of the Florida-Oklahoma game would solve anything going in. Thus it’s not a surprise they still feel that way coming out. In other words, it’s pure fantasy to say that whoever wins the BCS national championship game is an undisputed champion. It’s not designed to yield that result, no matter its claims.

Given what’s undeniable, why play the game at all? If a playoff in major college football is too logistically complicated for this nation to solve, a nation that solved the logistics of landing men on the moon and getting a package from Anchorage to Poughkeepsie overnight by the way, then stop trying. Stop acting as if the worst thing in life is different polls crowning a different teams number one.

The argument against the BCS is all the more compelling when you consider the unintended consequences this convoluted system has created. Essentially, the BCS system has chosen to sacrifice the value of a winning a conference championship in its quest to bring relevance to one game being played later and later each January. At the same time it’s also rendered meaningless every other bowl game except the self-titled National Championship game.

From a fan’s perspective, there simply is nothing meaningful about winning the Big Ten anymore, as an example. All it does is get you in the Rose Bowl. It doesn’t necessarily get a team a leg up on getting into the BCS title game. Indeed, given how little respected the Big Ten is these days, being the Big Ten champ carries all the prestige of being the prettiest girl in shop class.

The same goes for the Pac 10. If any major conference is less appreciated than the Big Ten it’s the Pac 10. USC is almost always a good team and the rest are almost always not. USC has its way in that conference every year, well in every year in which they take each game seriously anyway. It wasn’t the loss to Oregon State that kept USC out of the National Championship game, it was the lack of respect pollsters have for the conference.

But if there was no BCS at all, and it’s not hard to remember when that was the case, winning the conference carried not only prestige but a real chance to be crowned number one by someone, even if not by a consensus. This year’s Rose Bowl would have taken on far more meaning for both Penn State and USC and would have carried far greater implications if it had been on equal footing with all of the major bowl games. But since there was a BCS National Championship game looming with two other teams, it carried all the significance of a Randy Lerner press conference. The same is absolutely true of the Sugar Bowl game between Alabama and Utah. While it may have been sort of fun to watch Utah dominate a SEC team, it carried no meaning.

What I miss most are the days when there was a compelling reason to watch the Orange Bowl, the Rose Bowl and the Sugar Bowl. Now those games are just pictures at an exhibition with the added benefit to the teams of a lot of cash to keep them wedded to the current system.

When the presidents of the major conferences and their surrogates at the BCS say they aren’t interested in a playoff, they really are saying they aren’t interested in bringing certainty. Fine, then it would be great if they’d stop pretending they are by foisting a compromise on the public each year that is actually makes the problem worse, not better. Jettison the BCS games as the failed experiment they have become and really restore meaning to the bowl games you claim to you’re trying to protect in the first place.

The Edge of Emotion

There is a palpable sense of dread in the air as the Buckeyes begin their final preparations for Monday night’s BCS national championship game. It’s the kind of dread that most Cleveland fans certainly recognize having lived with the “please don’t let my team lose another big game” feeling most of their lives.

Call it a hangover from brutal 41-14 loss to the Florida Gators if you want, but it’s also fueled by a sense, largely unspoken among Buckeyes fans anyway, that this year’s Buckeyes team is not worthy of its current status and thus it’s bound to disappoint.

When half a season often passes between the last game of the regular season and the beginning of the bowl season, particularly the BCS bowls, whatever momentum that existed has long since been stilled. But if the Buckeyes do lose on Monday, it won’t likely be a question of talent. More likely it will be their inability, once again, to find the emotional edge that is often the difference in these college bowl games.

Consider this year’s bowl season. Start with the Rose Bowl. USC ran roughshod over Illinois egged on mainly by a lingering feeling that it had the best team in the nation this year but was thrown off track by injuries. The Illini, on the other hand, seemed to lack any emotion whatsoever. Surprised as anyone at how their season turned out, the Illini never expected to be in the Rose Bowl in the first place and played like it. They brought a wide-eyed sense of optimism but not much else and the 49-17 final score aptly reflected the emotional gulf between the two teams on Tuesday.

The Georgia/Hawaii game went much the same way. Georgia had been reeling since it was rightly snubbed for the BCS championship game. Their argument, with some appeal if not merit, was that they were more highly rated than LSU and thus should have been the SEC team that benefited when Missouri lost to Oklahoma and Pittsburgh beat West Virginia at season’s end. At the time, Georgia was number four in the rankings and LSU was seventh. But with LSU playing in and winning the SEC Championship against Tennessee while Georgia was sitting at home, the victim of having lost to both South Carolina and Tennessee earlier in the season, the pollsters ultimately determined that the rankings were just wrong and pushed LSU to number two and into the BCS title game.

This slight, perceived at best, was more than enough against a Hawaii team that looked like it would struggle against the MAC champion. Hawaii, another Western Athletic Conference champ like Boise State last year, may have had a little Boise State sort of edge about them entering the game, but that was hardly enough to overcome a bigger, stronger Georgia team with a bigger, stronger emotional edge. It showed in the 41-10 score.

The same story line continued on Wednesday night in the Fiesta Bowl. Despite having essentially been humiliated by a supposedly lesser opponent in Boise State the year before, the Oklahoma Sooners learned nothing from that experience. Instead, for the second straight year they walk away from a BCS game suffering another really bad loss.

It would have appeared entering the game that Oklahoma, like Georgia, had developed a chip on its shoulder about being left out of the national championship game. But whatever edge that perceived slight created was more than dulled by the self-inflicted perception that the Moutaineers would be little competition, reeling as they were from first suffering a crippling loss to a really bad Pittsburgh team, and second having lost the oily and overrated Rich Rodriguez as their head coach, a loss that has been controversial to say the least.

Meanwhile the Mountaineers, under a well liked interim coach practically begging for the job permanently (which he got) found a way to channel their rage and frustration against an Oklahoma team that should have known better but didn’t. From the first snap to the last play and the four hours in between, the Mountaineers literally ran the Sooners ragged, drilling them 48-28.

Even the Capitol One Bowl match up between Florida and Michigan followed much the same script. Florida was the fat and happy squad with the Heisman Trophy winner and the arrogant swagger of a team that figured once it showed up, its Big Ten opponent would crumble, kind of like Ohio State last year in the BCS national championship game, despite Florida already having lost three times this season.

The overmatched Michigan Wolverines, reeling from a season of coaching missteps and blown opportunities, were lucky to make it to a New Year’s Day bowl game at all. Added to the mix was a retiring coach who seems more beloved now than he ever did and an opportunistic third choice coach-in-waiting hovering over the proceedings like a kid waiting for his parents to leave on vacation already so he can drive the ‘vette.

But on the way to cementing his status as the latest genius, Florida head coach Urban Meyer couldn’t find a way to solve a Michigan offense that could only get 91 yards against Ohio State. As a result, he and his vaunted Gators, the beasts of the SEC and clearly faster and better than any team ever in the history of the Big Ten, found themselves on the losing end of a game in which they were the recipients of four Michigan turnovers.

The difference maker, obviously, was emotion. The Wolverines, with aspirations for a national championship before the season started, found themselves without anything much to play for after the season’s first game. But given a chance to send Lloyd Carr solidly into retirement with a warm and fuzzy feeling, not to mention the chance to lance the boils of big game failures by the likes of Chad Henne and Mike Hart, the Wolverines overcame a litany of poor tackling, dropped passes and turnovers early in the game to suddenly dominate when the game mattered most—in the fourth quarter.

The Buckeyes can choose to learn the lessons of these games by osmosis or can simply take a look at the film of their game against Florida last year. The beating they and the program took should be lesson enough as to exactly how much of a part emotion plays in the outcome. Many of the Buckeyes who played in last year’s game now admit they had lost their edge somewhere between the thrilling victory against Michigan and the improbable run and minor controversy that resulted in Florida getting into the game. The Buckeyes were heavily favored, had every accolade to enjoy and felt that they couldn’t be beat.

Florida, guided by Meyer, used the Buckeye’s arrogance against them to develop an underdog mentality that had, as its goal, proving that they not only belonged on the same field with the Buckeyes, but that they could beat the Buckeyes. When Ted Ginn, Jr. returned the opening kickoff for a touchdown, it turned out to be the worst thing that could happen to the Buckeyes, and not simply because Ginn got hurt. The Buckeyes falsely assumed the rest of the game would be a similar cakewalk all the while the Gators were planning their revenge, which they ultimately extracted in spades.

The real question facing the Buckeyes on Monday is how they will use last year’s loss and their underdog status, despite their ranking. Can head coach Jim Tressel funnel it into intensity, concentration and execution or will the team succumb to the weight of expectations? Certainly Tressel has been trying to pull the right levers on this score, even to the point of having a DVD made of all the negative things being said about the Buckeyes nationally. But will it be enough?

Last year’s loss was as much a psychological blow to the Buckeyes program as it was to the Big Ten overall and also hurt Tressel’s reputation, whether or not it should have. A win cures all. That won’t happen, however, if the Buckeyes and Tressel cannot find enough in this entire emotional quagmire to create a razor-sharp edge. And if they cannot, that dread fans are feeling now will continue unabated because the bashing they’ve been currently taking, as painful as it’s been for Buckeye fans, will turn out to be well deserved. And nothing hurts worse than the truth.

The BCS Mess

Those complaining for the 10th straight year about the mess that is the BCS have long since missed the point. Calling out its faults as if it will lead to some greater truth is roughly akin to pointing out Willie McGinest’s age and hoping it makes him younger.

Once the January 7, 2008 match-up of Ohio State and LSU for the national championship was announced, you would have thought that no greater crime against humanity had been committed. But for all those coaches out there complaining (yea, we’re pointing directly at you Mike Richt of Georgia) and the fans they’re firing up over the slights, perceived or real, it may be best to remember the words of Hyman Roth as he dressed down Michael Corleone, “this is the business we’ve chosen.”

The BCS isn’t perfect. In fact, it’s a joke, but not for the reasons most think. Its existence, plain and simple, is a fraud. It’s a jerry-rigged system whose sole purpose is to try and work around the majority of college presidents who like the way things have always been and have no real appetite to change it. Put it this way, if the majority of college presidents wanted a playoff system, they’d get one. They get everything else they want and the gleaming new buildings that dot most major campuses are a testament to that. But they like these traditional, antiquated bowls and the conference affiliations and the pageantry. They like being courted by men in plaid sport coats who take fact-finding missions in October and November to their campuses to see if the team is worthy of playing in their bowl game. In other words, they like things just the way they are.

If you’re still unconvinced, consider this: according to the BCS website, the NCAA hasn’t even considered a proposal to create a national championship in Division I-A since 1988 when a proposal presented at the Division I conference went down in flames, 98-13. The last time there was even any official discussion about a playoff, again according to the BCS website, was 1994 when a panel presented information about the viability of establishing a playoff system to the NCAA Presidents Commission which, not surprising, tabled it indefinitely.

Thus, if you want to shave a few points off your blood pressure reading, just move on past the notion that a playoff system is anywhere close to becoming a reality. Browns head coach Romeo Crennel has a better chance of winning three straight Super Bowls as a head coach than college football fans have of seeing the kind of playoff system that exists at every level of college football except Division I. In fact, even the NCAA tacitly accepts this fact. This past season, it renamed Division I-A and I-AA, with the former referred to as the Football Bowl Subdivision (Bowl, get it?) and the latter referred to as the Championship Subdivision (that’s Championship, meaning playoff champion, get it?).

The inevitable rub in all of this debate is the abject desire of the colleges to preserve their bowl system and the perceived wants, disguised as needs, of the fans who want to see a “national champion” crowned. But if the underlying thought is that this would somehow settle matters, as if matters actually needed settling in the first place, it won’t. No matter who is crowned champion in any given year hardly eliminates the arguments from the other two or three teams who feel they were screwed out of playing in the game in the first place.

This isn’t to suggest, by the way, that all the arguing about which team is better doesn’t have its place. It does. That’s why God invented bars and internet chat rooms. But expecting that a consensus will ever emerge on this topic or any other for that matter is wishful thinking. There are still folks who deny the Holocaust.

But given that this is the business we’ve chosen, it probably is worth at least pondering whether this year’s brand of controversy, which is just different but no less intense than last year’s controversy when Florida got into the BCS title game, should bring forth any changes. It should.

The first suggestion, and one I modestly made in the past, is to simply disband the BCS and accept the rather scary notion that different polls may have different opinions about who is number one. My reasoning then and my reasoning now stems from the fact that it has effectively rendered every other bowl game, including the other BCS games, meaningless. There is nothing about any game short of the title game that holds much interest to the casual fan, which seems to run contrary to the intent of the BCS in the first place. But its mere existence has created, in fact, less overall interest, not more. The Rose Bowl may be the granddaddy of all bowl games, but it’s now a granddaddy that just kind of sits in a chair and mumbles to himself and the rest of the family ignores.

Given that blowing up the BCS isn’t any more likely than implementing a playoff system, the one change that ought to be legitimately considered in college football is a delay in any polling until at least halfway through the season. Any polls taken prior to that point simply lack context and are based more on reputation and bias than any consequence of what may have taken place in that season.

Much has been made about the supposedly crazy football season that just completed. But those who made those observations were also the same ones who were responsible for the placement of the teams in the polls in the first place. It may be interesting to note that five supposedly number one and number two teams lost this past season, but no one seems to ask whether those teams were rightly ranked in the first place.

LSU, which finds itself in the BCS title game by virtue of its status of champion of the greatest football league there ever was, just ask them, is a particularly interesting study in this regard. Twice they were ranked number one and couldn’t hold it because they lost, ultimately, to unranked teams.

The argument goes, of course, that those losses were in triple overtime. So what? They were still losses and to not very good teams, either. The other argument goes that when LSU lost to Kentucky, the Wildcats were highly ranked. True, but that’s the result of tremendous overrating of a team by an incompetent media panel and the lemming coaches that followed them, as the final results more than prove.

But this isn’t to just pick on LSU. The polls are literally laced with example after example. West Virginia almost got into the title game with a resume that was far worse than Ohio State’s. They lost early to South Florida, another early favorite of the pollsters that, in the end, turned into an unranked average team in an average conference, and the late loss to a lousy Pitt team only proves that the Mountaineers were mostly a good MAC team in the first place. On the opposite side of that coin is Ohio State. Their loss to Illinois, as it turns out, wasn’t nearly as bad as initially figured, given where the Illini ended up at season’s end. Heck, they made the Rose Bow which, the last time I looked, is a BCS game.

The overarching point to all of this is that time and again those voting in the polls were incompetent, unqualified or easily manipulated, but in any case consistently wrong. That was fine in the days when there was no BCS title game, but given the emphasis the arcane BCS formula places on these polls, it is more relevant than ever.

In fact, if there’s anything the BCS architects get right it is the fact that they don’t start publishing their poll until about six weeks into the season in recognition that anything prior to that point is essentially meaningless. The AP, the USA Today Coaches Poll, the Harris Interactive Poll and every other geek with a computer and a homegrown algorithm should sit back and let the season unfold in the same way before they even begin to think about publishing any sort of poll. It may not have completely avoided the perceived chaos that took place this year, but it would have come close.

But, too, just as there is no chance that the BCS will quietly disappear, there is no chance that the polls will fix their own procedures. In other words, you can forget about any sort of meaningful change. The desire just isn’t there. The numerous constituencies involved, be they fans, coaches, college presidents, network television executives, are not only absolutely convinced in the rightness of their views, they’re hell-bent on convincing everyone else of the wrongness of their views. And the reason, I guess, that we continue to argue about this still? Well, it’s kind of like the answer the person gives for continuing to bang his head against the wall: it feels good when we stop.