BCS Primer

After another exciting weekend of college football, full of drama, upsets, and spectacular performances, one thing is certain:

None of it truly matters.

There is no playoff in NCAA Division 1 men's football; thus, nothing that happened this weekend or any other weekend is of any significance whatsoever.

The best any team can claim is their conference championship, period. However, the poobahs who run the Bowl Championship Series will arrogantly proclaim that a national champion will be crowned a few days after New Year's Day.

I realize that the following point may be lost on many 'Mericans, largely because of the sport involved, but no one argues about the world champion of soccer because the world championship of soccer is a tournament that...wait for it...invites the whole world. (By the way, this is pretty much why we should stop calling the MLB and NBA champs "world champions"...but I digress.)

Someone might ask: why do I keep beating an increasingly dead horse? Haven't others made the same point elsewhere?

To which I respond: as long as news organizations like the Associated Press, Yahoo!, and ESPN continue to pretend that whatever Florida did at South Carolina matters in the greater scheme of things, I will continue to flog this particular equine corpse. Why is any college football game big news? Nothing of consequence will be won when all is said and done, yet the media are complicit in the sham that is the BCS.

Speaking of sham, have you seen the current bowl game schedule, promoted and broadcast by partner-in-crime ESPN? There are currently 34, count 'em, 34 bowl games scheduled between December 19 and January 7.

What will any of the participants have won when the final gun sounds? Nothing. Not a stinkin' thing. I mean, you'd think that the winners of the Chick-Fil-A Bowl would at least get a sandwich or something...never mind the inherent lunacy of a Chick-Fil-A Bowl, but I digress.

No, check that, I'm NOT digressing. It is the stupidity that lends itself to taking a Chick-Fil-A Bowl seriously that propels this entire BCS nonsense. The Chick-Fil-A Bowl? It's no stupider than taking seriously the former sponsors of the current Humanitarian Bowl; you might remember it as the Poulan Weed Eater-Independence Bowl. Strangely, the winners of that game of yore received neither a weed eater nor their independence, although we can still hold out hope that the winners of the current iteration may be granted their humanity at the very least.

NCAA Division 1 men's football, like boxing and horse racing, only truly matters to gambling degenerates and the leg-breakers who help them find their wallets. Sadly, also like horse racing and boxing, major college football's best moments occurred before MTV premiered. However, that's not the true horror of this once-grand sport.

This sport could become the absolute king of "amateur" sports if a genuine playoff were instituted. I'll hear nothing from anyone arguing about "final exams" and "student welfare." If we can schedule bowl games for December 19, about a month after most teams are done with their conference schedules, we can schedule a playoff. I don't particularly care how it's done; smarter people than myself have created reasonable scenarios where we never, ever have to wonder if Boise St. is as good as Florida. Once a tournament is in place, the debate is over because both teams will have 60 minutes to get it figured out.

How much more would we respect a Florida or an Alabama team that had to beat four battle-hardened opponents to win a genuine national championship, one that encompassed every major conference? What would ratings be like? How much will the wiseguys in the desert make from such a venture? Unfortunately, as long as the boneheads in charge of the BCS keep perpetrating the current fraud, we will never know.

However, we will know the answer to at least one question: what will the winner of whatever the game is on January 7 have earned?

A big, empty glass trophy, as fragile as the lie which created it.