BCS, or just BS?

First things first ... those weekend picks of mine went pretty well. I had Pittsburgh-Jacksonville as my closest game which it was, but I got nipped at the buzzer by the Jags winning field goal. Aside from that I was perfect in the football games as well as the junior game with Team Canada coming up big as expected! The weekend's games set up some fantastic matchups for next weekend though. I'm not giving away any of my picks yet, but all four games look exciting and it feels a lot like the Elite Eight weekend in March Madness. Lots of excitement, with the ability to focus individually on each game with no distractions!

Moving on to the BCS Championship game tonight, it seems to be highlighting exactly why the BCS needs to change college football into a system with, at the very least, a Plus-One game, or at best, an 8 team playoff. Even a playoff wouldn't be perfect though when you consider that 11th ranked West Viriginia pounded #3 Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl, and wouldn't have been included in a playoff. But, in this year where no team managed to win all the games they were supposed to (see: USC-Standford, WVU-Pitt, LSU-Arkansas, et. al.), who was really the best?

There are a lot of teams' fans who are going to try to lay some claim to being the best team this year and there are a lot who will say that this LSU team is an undeserving champion. After all, they lost two games to teams who each finished the year 8-5. Tiger fans would have a hard time convincing me that they were the best when Kansas went 12-1, suffering their only loss to an excellent Missouri team. That's the same Missouri team who finished 11-2. Unfortunately for Missou, both of those losses came at the hands of Oklahoma, who proceeded to lay an egg in their bowl game, getting hammered by West Virginia. Yup, the WVU team who also finished 11-2 (though their two losses were both pretty bad to USF and Pitt). The loudest arguments right now are coming out of LA where USC fans try to argue that the Trojans were the best in the nation this year. Unfortunately for them, they suffered a lot of injuries this year that led to an absolutely embarrassing loss against Stanford and another loss to Oregon. But injuries aren't a valid argument. After all, that loss to Oregon was mostly due to Dennis Dixon who had the Ducks becoming a National Champion favourite mid-season before suffering a broken leg. Oregon never recovered and looked terrible without him.

One can dream of a playoff that would have given us a true champion played out on the field, but unfortunately, that's just not going to happen. The university presidents will continue to argue that the football players can't handle having their season run across two semesters for academic reasons despite permitting exactly that for several other sports including Basketball and Hockey. The NCAA won't change their stance that a playoff would diminish the importance of every regular season game. The Bowl organizations themselves will continue to think that the importance of their individual games would be diminished. And those old lovebirds the Big Ten and Pac 10 are so married to the Rose Bowl that they won't sign off on any more changes to the bowl system.

Ultimately, it's impossible to say who was the best team in 2007-2008. All we can say now is that LSU has got a lovely crystal football to put in their halls and lots of college football fans can be left somehow unsatisfied.