BCS: Just Let the Fat Kid Play—What Are You Afraid of?

The only problem with college sports is that there are just way too many teams for every team to compare themselves directly against every other team on an annual basis.

It is sort of like saying that your fifth-grade son is the finest athlete ever to kick a playground ball in your town if he only plays kickball against the kids in his neighborhood. Determining who is actually the best is impossible.

Most, if not all, professional sports leagues have solved this problem by either limiting the number of teams in an equal league or pitting champions in a head-to-head contest like the World Series. Baseball has even implemented interleague play in recent years.

This doesn't necessarily prove one team is the best, again an impossible task. What it does decide is which organization was the best at navigating the pre-determined rules of competition for a set period of time. Usually these rules happen to include some sort of playoff in the end.

I'm not sure soccer works this way, at least not internationally. But we're talking sports here, so let's leave soccer, ice dancing, and chess out of the discussion.

College basketball sort of solves this dilemma with the NCAA basketball tournament, which allows a plethora of undeserving teams to compete just to maximize the appearance of fairness and minimize whining.

College football, however, has taken the low road of determining a champion by adopting the Olympic method. This consists of an uppity committee of self-declared know-it-alls who offer their propaganda-soaked opinions of what might happen if head-to-head games were actually played.

The Southeast Elementary School kids are better coached, attract better athletes due to it being a lower income neighborhood, and traditionally produce the highest number of players to kick balls at the next level, wherever that may be. Given these undeniable truths, we can already exclude many other kids from across town.

Most college football participants prefer this over actually playing a game in order to avoid messy intangibles such as heart, motivation, unscouted high school recruits, deception, controversial coaching philosophies, or any other offensive and unfair tactic that might have been used by Boise State.

Based on these completely subjective rankings, bowl game participants are selected like fifth-grade kickball teams. They pick the fat kids last who will serve as shields and decoys for the real athletes.

The fat kids this year are the Utes. I think I heard Corso whisper to Herbstreit, "Who invited them? The BCS is our playground. I wish they'd go away and let us play with ourselves some more. I don't care how many dorks they beat at that park across town, there's no way they can compete with us. We really kicked that Hawaiian kid's butt, didn't we?"

Well, they keep showing up here because it seems it is the only place in the country where they can get a good game. They haven't been beaten in their Mountain West neighborhood, and many of the better players from the BCS neighborhoods have quit showing up at all.

So to placate the included-ness monitors of NCAA Football, we'll put them in a meaningless game against Alabama to determine who was the most overrated team invited to a BCS Bowl. Is that a shield or a decoy?

Granted, it is the highest ranked opponent a non-BCS team has ever had the chance to play in a bowl game. If Utah embarrasses the Tide like they humiliated Pitt in 2004, will the cool kids finally admit to being biased, or will they change the rules again to officially exclude WAC and Mountain West nerds forever?