Chutzpah makes the world go ‘round.

The Bowl Championship Series is a product of man’s eternal folly. It’s also proof of his infinite optimism. For 12 years running, the architects of the BCS have tried and failed to solve college football’s most insoluble riddle—which would be worse news if trying and failing to solve insoluble riddles weren’t so instrumental in the march of human progress.

Humility means admitting the limitations of your intellect.

Hubris, on the other hand, means accepting the boundlessness of your will.

I’m not suggesting that the BCS deserves anyone’s praise. The system’s scandalous history speaks for itself, and an old-fashioned playoff system would certainly settle things much more rationally. But we rational primates aren’t bred to settle for old-fashioned certainties. In a game where innovation wins championships, you can’t fault a tinkerer for flouting the rules of common sense.

The heart wants what it wants.

The head dreams what it dreams.

If there’s a moral to the BCS story, it’s simply that Homo sapiens is no wiser than the whims of his prefrontal cortex.

Statisticians are the high priests of the sports universe. Margin of victory, opponents’ winning percentage, opponents’ opponents’ out-of-conference record—college football fans worship a series of data points, as if deliverance were to be found in some sacred digit. The irony, then, is that we don’t recognize the BCS as the logical end of our illogical faith. Atheists will argue that there’s no such thing as a mathematical No. 1. I’d counter that the actual existence of a measurably supreme team is far less important than our capacity to believe in it.

Ingenuity is good.

Audacity is better.

The BCS eggheads may have blundered in their efforts to quantify the unquantifiable, but at least they were brazen enough to crunch the numbers against the odds.

Diffident species don’t make it to the top of the food chain. If you want to aim high you have to take risks; if you have to take risks you may well fall hard. The ugly truth about the BCS is that it looks an awful lot like us, with its grandiose designs and its glorious deficiencies. Every earthly idea is born in the heat of soaring ambition. The one that dies in a heap of smoldering ashes should still be celebrated for having burned its way to heaven.

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The Marquis de Laplace never engineered a Strength of Schedule algorithm, but he did have an abiding fondness for complex equations:

An intelligence which at a given instant knew all the forces acting in nature and the position of every object in the universe—if endowed with a brain sufficiently vast to make all necessary calculations—could describe with a single formula the motions of the largest Big 12 titans and those of the smallest WAC wannabes. To such an intelligence, nothing would be uncertain; the Alabama-Texas outcome, like the past, would be an open book.

Which has been the siren song of every seeker from Socrates to Sagarin.

Because mortal knowledge isn't half as tempting as divine vision, and anyone who mocks mankind's pursuit of an omniscient machine is either programming the BCS computers or only just saying, is all...