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I don't know exactly what Comrade Dodd is thinking, in part because I suspect he was drunk Sunday evening, but I know who to blame for this year's everybody-hates-the-BCS BCS.
I blame college football, and everyone involved in it. Not because of the system, which we know is an angry raccoon down your shorts. Not because of the conferences who consistently screw themselves for the short dollar by jeopardizing its members with a conference title game.
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| Don't scar yourself trying to picture SEC commish/BCS boss Mike Slive in fishnets and stiletto heels. (US Presswire) |
No, I blame college football for assembling a season in which 15 No. 11 teams just exchanged places over and over again because nobody could keep their attentions steady for 12 or 13 weeks. Because there were so many Gator Bowl-level teams in the country and so few teams without one easily exploitable flaw. Because there were so many teams that didn't seize the moment that you get three four-loss teams playing on New Year's Day.
So I guess I blame the players and coaches for not finding two great teams among them. I guess I blame the NCAA for letting all the teams expand their schedules to 12 games, and for so many teams filling those 12th games with lard rather than real opponents.
I guess I blame the pollsters for not being able to figure out how to separate unequal conferences playing in unequal systems.
But even given all that, the teams themselves had ample opportunities to produce two among them who deserved the title game, and eight more teams that could stratify themselves properly to make the BCS choices no-brainers. And they produced this –- the weirdest, least awe-inspiring and most enjoyable regular season ever.
Now we don't want to give the BCS machine too much credit, because we know that it is fueled entirely, completely and galactically by the universities' appetite for money. The BCS is a whorehouse, pure and simple, and if you've seen the people who run the BCS, you'd have an unpleasant time envisioning them in short skirts, fishnet stockings and clear heels.
But it is probably no more inexact at finding the 10 best teams than a system designed to find the best eight teams, especially this year. The only difference between the BCS hooker-for-a-day system and the playoff system is that instead of Missouri justifiably claiming it got screwed, you'd have Kansas claiming it got screwed, or worse yet, Hawaii knowing it got screwed.
And the truth is, as many neutrals want to see Hawaii-Georgia as any game on the schedule, because of what Boise State did to Oklahoma last year, and because of what Hawaii could do this year. Hawaii is a show in and of itself, and deserved what it got in Georgia.
But ultimately, all this fulminating about the system hides the fact that no system could solve this season, or sort out the best four, eight, 10, 16 or 25 teams. Couldn't be done, period, and all our bloggish friends who have made hay criticizing the AP voters for having the temerity to put their names behind their votes know this in their hearts. This year was a bitch, pure and simple.
So as much as we would like to kill the system, we know that there isn't one system, but about nine, working in an indecipherable knot that makes the old Yugoslavian parliament look like a one-color Rubik's cube. And as much as we want to wonder why we couldn't make sense of this season, there was no sense to be made. Thank Appalachian State for Michigan. Thank Stanford for Southern California. Thank Illinois for Ohio State. Thank LSU for Virginia Tech, and thank Kentucky and Arkansas for LSU, and Oklahoma twice for Missouri, and Colorado for Oklahoma, and aaagggkkkkhkhkhkthump.
You want to know why college football didn't quite get it right? Blame the football. And then buy plenty of beer for the bowl system, because even a nasty old trollop like the BCS is plenty good enough for you.
Ray Ratto is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.
