BCS minus USC = BS

Go ahead and chill the beer for Sunday's Sugar Bowl. But if you want to know the name of the best college team in the country, ask Michigan.

Comments

[Allen]

Amen! And I'm an LSU grad, class of '86.

USC is the best team in the country. I'd really like to see them play either Oklahoma or LSU. I think they would defeat either quite handily.

[Franklin Harris]

Quit your complaining. The BCS is meant to reward the two best teams over the course of an entire season, not the best team right now. The AP poll suffers from a bias that rates losses early in the season as less important than losses late in the season. The BCS isn't perfect, but it at least corrects for that rather blatant flaw.

[Luca Brasi]

Maybe if USC didn't play such a weak schedule, they would be in the Sugar Bowl.

[GoBares]

Maybe if USC could get it done against Cal, we wouldn't be having this dicussion.

[Justin Slotman]

Franklin said: "Quit your complaining. The BCS is meant to reward the two best teams over the course of an entire season, not the best team right now. The AP poll suffers from a bias that rates losses early in the season as less important than losses late in the season. The BCS isn't perfect, but it at least corrects for that rather blatant flaw."

I dunno, Franklin. By that standard every sport with a playoff system is fatally flawed, since they invariably reward the best team right now with the championship. American sports are all about winning when it matters, not overall success. Which is why college football is so odd within American sports, and why the BCS is so completely unsatisfying, especially when you compare it with college basketball.

They need to either go back to the old exclusively poll-based system or to a playoff. This BCS Frankenstein bowl-playoff monster isn't working.

[disinterested_bystander]

Watching the Rose Bowl yesterday, I nearly gagged every time Keith Jackson or Dan Fouts whined that this was the "human championship," as opposed the the computer championship about to be played by cybernetic simu-drones in the Sugar Bowl.

The BCS has only one function: generate even more controversy than the previous (and no less biased) poll system. Mission accomplished.

[MB]

So USC won the national championship by beating a grossly overrated Michigan team? Had Oklahoma won the Big 12 championship, no one would be praising USC to the high heavens right now-- we'd all be waiting on the outcome of the Sugar Bowl. Had Oklahoma's loss boosted USC into the Sugar Bowl against LSU, no one would be calling Oklahoma national champs for beating Michigan (as they most assuredly would have). Why does LSU get screwed for Oklahoma's loss? Why does USC get all this slobbering praise for beating #4 Michigan by a coupla touchdowns?
We need to retain the BCS, but with a top-four playoff incorporated into the existing bowl structure. That would solve all the problems by adding only one extra game.
As for USC, sorry-- the current set-up is inadequate, but they didn't make the cut, despite the fact that their #1 poll rankings were factored into their BCS standing.

[dude]

32 team playoff

four weeks no controversy everyone is happy...

[Jason Ligon]

Dude,

Except the schools who lose Tostitoes and Nokia cash, which is what this is really about anyway ...

[Mo]

Luca,
I think Texas and Virginia Tech will argue about the weakness of USC's sked. They scheduled a strong schedule (Auburn was a pre-season #1 by some "experts") that simply didn't pan out. Sure, USC could've gotten it done and saved a lot of trouble, but a triple-OT loss on the road vs. an underrated Cal team mid-season isn't as bad as the whupping K-State put on OU. However, in the college football world, how much you win by isn't a factor in how good you are.

[mak_nas]

in the end, the system is wrong if the people who sit in a pub or stadium on fall saturdays watching the games believe, in the main, that it is wrong. there is no objective standard -- only subjective opinion. and i dare you to find ten people in a hundred who think the BCS is right.

that being so, it is wrong by any meaningful standard. so something else should be adopted if the sport wants to maintain some kind of legitimate public interest in the national championship concept (which is very profitable, of course).

[Luca Brasi]

The Pac-10 is a joke as far as football goes. Not to mention that USC had three bye weeks. That is unheard of.

[Douglas Fletcher]

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

[matt]

The writer's poll and coaches poll don't reflect the entire season which is what the bcs system tries to do. Teams get punished for losing late rather than early when it shouldn't matter. The BCS tries to sort out the best team over the entire season...not that present week.

[AJMB]

James Carville, of all people, made this comment: How can the American system of higher education (universities), who have produced some of the greatest intellects in the history of mankind, not come up with a better system than the BCS? Mind you, he's an LSU alum.

[cliff]

As I sit here 88 miles upriver from the Superdome, watching my alma mater make Laters out of Sooners, (famous last words; there's 10 minutes left in the game...), it's hard for me to have simpathy for the USC #1 argument. LSU and OU are evenly matched - it is one helluva of a game. Not a one sided blowout by a top 5 team against an over-rated one. All I can say is, strength of schedule. Strength of schedule.

Maybe there sould be another "Super-BCS" bowl - Sugar Bowl winner against USC. It would settle this question once and for all, and put some $$ in ESPN's pocket. Any takers?

[Lori]

The BCS system may not be perfect, but in previous years when USC has won the national championship -- i.e. taken home the trophy (like LSU did Sunday) -- there has been a split poll regarding who is considered the national champion. I don't recall USC whining about the unfairness of the BCS system then when they had trophy in hand. It worked for them those years. It didn't this year, and they need to quit whining about it. If the system needs to be fixed, then fix it. But don't second guess or diminish a national championship, in this case earned by LSU, because you end up with the short stick one year.

[Highway]

cliff,

The 'Bowl-Plus' system is kinda what you're talking about. I don't see why they can't use the bowls as a playoff like that. I don't think there will ever be more than 4 legitimate contenders for the national championship, so just put those 4 teams in 2 bowls, then take the winners and have a championship game. I think the biggest obstacle to this idea is adding another game to schedules that have already ballooned from 10 games (plus maybe a bowl) 20 years ago to 12 or 13 games plus a bowl. But it would only add one game, and you could use the BCS system, with its full season reward plus the factoring of other issues, to select the 4 teams in the running. I think this would be the best merging of the 'traditional' bowls and the need for a clear champion.

Although the 'need' for a clear champion may not be so pressing in the world of college football, where the NCAA and the schools probably relish the idea of having multiple teams claim a championship.