Dammit, the BCS Worked

I hate the BCS. I hate the fact that college football, the most intensely scrutinized NCAA sport, has never had an effective method of crowning a champion. The BCS was proved to be broken at the end of the 2004 season, when Auburn managed to go undefeated in the SEC and somehow not play in the National Championship, instead sluggishly winning a deflating Sugar Bowl matchup with Virginia Tech while USC blew out an overmatched and undeserving Oklahama, a school which somehow avoids being lumped in with Ohio State as perpetually undewhelming National Championship runner-ups.

To reiterate: Auburn went undefeated in the SEC, a conference which has won the last three championships handily and, if Alabama takes care of Texas, could have four in a row and five of the last seven.

Unfortunately, the changes that catastrophe sparked were only cosmetic, and the BCS remains a financially monstrous impediment to any sort of playoff system. With five undefeated teams and one-loss repeat champion Florida headed into this postseason, playoff-clamoring sports fans were expecting points to be proven. Alas, reality set in, and the playoff movement may have been set back.

We knew that undefeated Alabama against unbeaten Texas was the perfect fit for the championship. The BCS gave us two other wrinkles. In the Sugar Bowl, they gave us unbeaten Cincinnati against a championship-calibre Florida squad. In an adorable Fiesta Bowl matchup, they sent unbeaten mid-majors TCU and Boise State to play amongst themselves while the adults took care of important matters. The mid-majors (and let's face it, the Big East is a mid-major, BCS-conference be damned) had an unbelievable opportunity to make some noise in a broken system. And they dropped the ball.

Cincy never, for one single moment, had the slightest chance against a Florida team that wasn't even playing at full intensity in a let-down game following their destiny-altering loss to Alabama. Florida flat-out proved that soft-scheduled Cincinnati had no business whatsoever in a title game, or even a playoff spot. The fact that Cincy was by large consensus considered a better team than TCU or Boise State cast a shadow over the yet-to-be played Fiesta Bowl, a shadow they never lifted.

With a national spotlight and everything to prove, both teams looked flat-out bad in a largely unexciting 17-10 Boise win. Dropped passes, busted plays, blown coverage and two quarterbacks who looked completely out-fo-sync and out-of-place marred the intriguing game and proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that no team in the country had the right to challenge Texas or Alabama for a number one ranking at the end of the season. TCU and Boise State's only hopes against the big 3 (we are including Florida, whose SEC Championship loss to Alabama also hurt the cause by serving as a de facto playoff game) would be to outscore them, catching a break or two along the way. On Monday night, they couldn't outscore each other, managing only 10 points each on offense (a pick-six for Boise proved to be the difference).

The BCS is broken. We know this much. But to see major changes we need major controversy. The past few years have delivered plenty of it, but this season everything fell into place and the BCS worked flawlessly. The money-grubbing higher-ups now have their counterpoint to the Auburn debacle, in a short-memoried society, they can point to this season as proof that their computers get it right. And just this once, there is nothing we can say, so with no shame and no regret they can postpone a proper playoff system another year, another five years, as another seemingly endless stream of excuses keep a nation screaming for change in a tradition no one wants.