By Brian Burwell
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Published: December 2, 2011 - 11:05 PM
ST. LOUIS: The snake oil salesmen who perpetrate the grandest hoax in American sports will be at it again this weekend, spritzing perfume on the pig that is the so-called Bowl Championship Series and expecting us to believe the final games of this regular season are part of the pageantry of college football.
Part of the hoax is how players, coaches, media and fans are preparing to wage debates about the outcome of championship games in the SEC, Big 12, ACC and Pac-12, and pretend this is what makes major college football scintillating. The truth is, no matter how much the apologists rave, this is a phony championship system rigged against any schools from non-BCS conferences.
That’s how the BCS can create a system that pretty much guarantees a rematch of LSU versus Alabama in its “championship” game regardless how this weekend plays out. That’s how it is conceivable that unbeaten LSU could lose to Georgia in the SEC championship game today and still end up atop the BCS final rankings. That would then set up the “dream” rematch to decide major college football’s so-called national champion between two teams that failed to win their conference.
Since we’re already on that subject, it seems that I am a part of a controversy in the SEC because of some good old-fashioned Internet mischief regarding Alabama coach Nick Saban. In a Wikipedia article making the rounds in SEC country, when Saban was the coach at LSU in 2003-04, just before playing Oklahoma (which was blown out in the Big 12 championship game) in the 2004 BCS title game, he was alleged to have said “Anyone who doesn’t win their conference has no business playing in the national championship game.” According to the Wikipedia article, the quote was taken from a column I was supposed to have written on Dec. 8, 2003, titled “Saban ready for Oklahoma.”
Man, that’s a great quote isn’t it?
There’s only one problem with it. There’s a good chance Saban never said it, because I have scoured the Post-Dispatch archives and my personal computer and office files and failed to find this quote in any article I ever wrote, or for that matter in the column that was listed as the source of the supposed quote.
Oh how I wish it was legitimate, but it seems to be a fabrication.
The best quote I can find from Saban that I can verify was from a column I wrote after interviewing Saban at a press conference before the ’04 BCS championship game. Saban was championing the idea of a playoff system, in this case a so-called “plus one” system touted in a Nike ad that would have pitted the winner of the Rose Bowl (USC, which was ranked No. 1 in the polls before the bowl game, but didn’t make the top two in the BCS rankings) playing the winner of the Sugar Bowl in a winner-take-all, legitimate national-title game.
“Use some kind of system that you call the BCS, or whatever, that takes four teams or eight teams,” Saban said. “But I think it’s important to keep the bowl system that we have right now. ... You know, I have a tremendous respect for the system that we have ... [but] the system is not equipped to handle three teams at the top, and that was the case this year.”
The system in place now is not equipped to handle three teams at the top or five or six or seven teams at the top, or any other combination you can come up with, because as long as one of those teams is a non-BCS conference team, that team has no chance of vying for the title.
Sports is supposed to be the fairest environment you’ll ever see. We race, we jump, we hit, we throw. We keep score. We measure. We record the winners and losers. May the best team win. But that simple rule seems to apply everywhere in our sports culture but in major college football.
The BCS apologists cling to the mantra “Every game counts.” It’s all part of the propaganda that the regular season is college football’s championship playoff system. They will tell you that the regular season is the lengthy elimination round that sets up their bogus “championship” game. Yet as best as my doddering old mind can recall, if the regular season is supposed to eliminate teams, then Alabama is already out of the hunt since the two teams already played earlier in the season and ’Bama lost 9-6.
The trouble with this potential matchup — or any matchup that the BCS ends up with — hasn’t changed since the whole scam was concocted years ago.
It’s about opinions. The route to a national championship game shouldn’t be about opinions. And it shouldn’t be up to pollsters or computers to determine who belongs in the BCS championship. There’s no chance that unbeaten Houston will get within sniffing distance of the championship game.
So that’s why I am back to rooting for chaos to wreck everything. By the end of the weekend, I am hoping that No. 1 LSU gets blown out by Georgia, and that Oklahoma State, No. 3 in the BCS rankings, crushes Oklahoma in the Big 12 championship game.
What would be great is if by the time the weekend is over, even after the BCS announces its bowl pairings no matter what they are, the Associated Press writer’s poll comes out Monday and has a top fivethat doesn’t look anything like the BCS rankings.
Why can’t we have a crazy weekend that gives Oklahoma State, Stanford, Virginia Tech, Houston or Boise State legitimate claims on the top two slots? Whatever causes the most possible damage to the validity of this bogus system, that’s what I’m rooting for.
