BCS Rankings: System Can't Be Blamed for Boring National Championship Game

The Alabama Crimson Tide and LSU Tigers were the two best college football teams in the country during the regular season and were correctly ranked as No. 1 and No. 2 in the final BCS standings back in early December.

Since there isn't a playoff system in place, the system did its job of placing the nation's top two squads against each other. Therefore it should remain devoid of any blame for the snooze fest that was the national title game on Monday night.

Although dominant offenses now rule the roost in the NFL, defense is still king in college football. Alabama and LSU had the best two scoring defenses in the nation, so it was no surprise that both matchups were low-scoring affairs.

It would have been nice to see what a high-powered offense like Oklahoma State or Stanford could have done against those vaunted defensive units. But that's just not possible with the current bowl plan in place.

The BCS actually did a nice job this season of weeding out the pretenders. The amount of controversy was minimal compared to previous seasons. In other words, the ranking system did exactly what it was suppose to do in 2011.

It's the NCAA brass that deserves criticism for the season's anticlimactic ending. Fans had to wait more than a month between games to see the most important clash of the season and, unless you're an Alabama supporter, it was a complete dud.

Add in the fact LSU and Oklahoma State could both make legitimate cases to be deserving of the national title and it's nothing more than a big mess.

That's why college football will eventually need to embrace a playoff system. It won't fix every problem that exists in college football, but it will make the end of the season a lot more interesting and fair to the elite teams.

Hopefully it's only a matter of time before the powers that be realize it. It should be clear that change is necessary when the BCS spits out rankings that nearly everybody can agree with and there's still turmoil when the title game ends.

The BCS can stay, but the bowl system must go.