If Monday night's BCS National Championship game proved anything conclusively, it was that Boise State deserves the title this year.

I know the fans of the big boys cringe at the thought of handing a WAC team any sort of hardware, but there really shouldn't be a debate on this one. The fact that the writers and coaches only voted the Broncos 5th and 6th, respectively, in their final polls shows just how little said groups understand the realities of college football.

The common argument against the undefeated Broncos comes down to schedule. According to Wes Colley's rankings, Boise ranked 81st in overall SOS. This would seem to preclude any possibility of their earning a title nod, but take a closer look at the numbers: Wisconsin was 75th, and Virginia was 71st . If Wisconsin had beaten Michigan earlier in the year, would there have been any doubt that they deserved a shot at Ohio State? If Virginia had gone undefeated, would they have been shut out of the championship game?

The truth is that Boise State had just as many genuinely meaningful wins as Louisville, and went into bowl season with one less loss—and still the national consensus had Louisville pegged as the the far superior team.

Why?

Easy: Louisville comes from a BCS conference. Louisville has NFL prospects. Louisville rubbed shoulders with two other undefeated teams in the Big East for most of the season, which not only boosted the Cardinals' strength of schedule but also put them in the national spotlight on multiple occasions.

Of course, both of those undefeated teams turned out to be grossly overrated: West Virginia lost to USF and then barely beat Georgia Tech in their bowl game; Rutgers lost to Cincinnati and was cast off into the Insignificant Bowl, where they drilled a mediocre Kansas State team. By comparison, all of Boise State's bowl-eligible opponents won their postseason games, with the highlight coming when Hawaii blew out the same Arizona State team that nearly knocked off USC.

And then we come to the most disturbing reason Louisville was consistently ranked ahead of Boise State in 2006: prognostication. Louisville, you see, was ranked 13th to start the season, while Boise State received a mere 23 votes. Poll logic generally works so that if a team wins, they either march in time or move up—which means that Boise State started the season looking up a mountain.

Don't want to believe that the preseason polls matter? Imagine a world in which every writer in the country thought Boise State was the number one team before the first coin toss. Would they have ever moved down? Make no mistake, they'd have been playing for all the marbles on Monday night—or the national media would've had a fit. The fact of the matter is that too much in college football boils down to gridiron groupthink, reformulated on a weekly basis in an effort to validate preseason biases.

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