One last gasp

UPDATE #1:A solid, if sloppy and uneven 24-14 win over Oklahoma last night by the Passion of Tim Tebow and the Florida Gators did nothing to dispel our notion that they are necessarily a better, currently, team than USC, Texas or Utah. So, with apologies to Urban Meyer (of whom we are a big fan and of whom we predicted great things) whose team did everything it needed in order to win the BCS championship, we are throwing the decision as to who is the real “mythical champion” of college football to our readers. It’s been a while and we credit B-Daddy for the idea. It’s in your hands dear readers: Florida, Utah, Texas or USC…. Who’s #1? (poll in right hand margin)
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Two straight college football posts. Just what in the sam-hill is going on around here.

As the college football bowl season grinds to a merciful conclusion and just when we were going to begrudgingly give a tacit nod to this year’s BCS championship match up between the Florida Gators and the Oklahoma Sooners by taking a break from our regularly scheduled BCS-bashing… last week happened.

Last week where a physically dominant USC team toyed with a very good one-loss Penn St. team (whom we might add was the sexy pick for the BCS bowl upset), took the 4th quarter off and still won by 2 touchdowns and where an undefeated Utah team destroyed an Alabama team that was ranked #1 in the nation going into their previous game, 31-17 and also where Texas finished the season with one loss by beating Ohio St. in the Fiesta Bowl and which also beat one of the BCS championship game participants (Oklahoma) earlier in the year.

(Quick side note: We keep hearing about how Alabama lost to Utah because they “weren’t up for the game” and that “Utah had more to play for”. Why is it that we’ve heard more of that in recent years than we can remember in years previous to that? Could it be the glut of bowl games we’re forced to endure? Could it be the uncompelling match ups wrought, in part, by the BCS? We’re not sure but the causal evidence seem to be pretty strong).

So where do we go from here? We watched all 3 of those teams play and we can’t sit here and say under any circumstance that those 3 schools are un-deserving of a shot at the BCS championship.

One of the ideas we’ve heard over the last few years and which very well-meaning people trot out as a “path to an eventual playoff” is this idea of a “plus-one”, as in, a game after the Florida/Oklahoma game against another team to then determine the true national champion. This, they tell us is the next step to a true playoff.

In reality, though, all this would do would be to add another layer of frustration and nonsensicalness to an already dubious system.

And how, exactly would that work this year when you have 3 teams, all with a legitimate argument to being one of the “plus-one” participants?

And how do you think Florida and Oklahoma would feel about this arrangement?

Hey, wait a minute, did we as the #1/#2 ranked team in the nation not just beat the #2/#1 ranked team in the nation? And now you are telling us that to reeeeally be the BCS champion, we have to play one more game against a team that was ranked #3 or lower?

The more “ideas” come up in way of a “plus-one” or the sure-to-fail incorporation of the bowls into a playoff system, the more ridiculous the current state of the BCS system and any future permutations, thereof, appears.

No bowls, no more.

P.S. Take Florida giving the 4 pts.

P.P.S. Numbers-crunching stat nerd and head Sabermetrician Bill James, explains why computers make no sense in determining rankings in college football, here. OK, then.