Texas Vs. Alabama: The BCS Lucks Out, Mucks it Up and Ducks the Issue

Somehow the BCS got lucky as the college football season wrapped up this past weekend. Somehow Texas clicked a long, last second winning field goal in the Big 12 Championship game to stay undefeated and win the conference. Had they lost, which looked like it happened as time expired originally, there would have been chaos and major uproar over which of the remaining undefeated teams - Cincinnati, TCU or Boise State - deserved to hold the second spot in the BCS Championship game.

But, the BCS did get lucky, and was able to stuff away some of its annual criticism by creating a #1 vs. #2 BCS National Championship game. However, even in doing so, they still found ways to muck up the rest of the situation, and duck the true problems at hand.

Texas vs. Alabama is a very intriguing title game, and it's a solid match-up pitting two of the best teams in the country against each other. The key lies in the phrase "two of the best teams", because we'll never actually know which team belongs at the top of the heap and that's the problem with the BCS and what it continues to duck. Even if they do get a unanimous #1 vs. #2, who's to say those teams are any better than the other hot teams at the end of the season?

Since they don't have to play each other, no answers will ever be given. Since the big conference schools start with higher rankings in preseason polls that determine the entire season before a down is played, we'll never really know who deserves to be ranked where.

We all know that about the BCS already, and that's not to demerit the seasons of Texas and Alabama. I'll watch their match in the BCS Championship Game and I'm sure it will be a hard fought, hard hitting battle. Here, if you're a fan you can go buy your discount Texas Longhorns apparel or your Alabama shirts & clothing to outfit yourself for the big game- which is still a ludicrous month away from the day of this writing. But that's another issue for another day.

The point is though that there are three more undefeated squads standing that will never get a chance to play for the National Championship, and it's beyond reasoning. The BCS continually falls behind the veils of tradition and academics, as if all of the sudden that's what these colleges care about, for their football studs to be respectable student athletes, unencumbered with the burdens of playing an extra football game instead of studying for finals.

All of this is hard to stomach on its own, but the BCS also made another massive mistake this year as they pitted the two non-BCS conference schools, both undefeated, against one another in the Fiesta Bowl. It's as big of a duck as you can get, ensuring that one of them gets a loss at the end of the season, and neither gets a shot at proving the naysayers wrong by upsetting a major conference school.

The BCS here will fall back to the fact that they don't pick match-ups for the BCS bowl games. Instead they are in essence "drafted" from one game to the next. So TCU vs. Boise State was just happenstance based on the teams that were available... right? You're only fooling yourself if you believe that. It is a purposely crafted match-up, created to desperately cling to whatever scraps of legitimacy the system has left.

The BCS dodged a bullet and got lucky when Texas was given the chance to hit that field goal, and then nailed it. But they couldn't help themselves, and they shoved the undefeated non-BCS schools into a match against each other, and they continue to belabor the point and avoid the real problems at hand.

There is no worse joke, worse mockery of the system, in all of sports than the BCS, and this comes from a writer who spends his time knee deep in the world of boxing everyday.