Fringe Failures

Fringe Failures

Take a look at the National Championship Game match-up this season.

Regardless of whether or not you thought Oklahoma, Southern California or Georgia deserved a shot over Louisiana State, it’s tough to say the Bowl Championship Series didn’t do a decent job of filtering through a mediocre championship field.

Ohio State, despite its Screech Powers-weak schedule, was a no-brainer as a BCS conference champ and the only conference champ with one loss.

As for LSU, it won arguably the best conference in America and both of its losses came in triple overtime. Many would even argue LSU is the most talented team in the country.

For once, the BCS had an excuse to completely butcher the championship game and it didn’t. The computers lived up to their part of the bargain.

Unfortunately, the human part of the BCS didn’t.

Why?

Tradition.

The Rose Bowl could have rewarded college football fans with an absolute thriller of a game between USC and Georgia.

Instead, the bowl game elected to reward an entirely overmatched Illinois team and create a pair of virtually un-watchable contests.

The Rose Bowl selected the second-best team from the fourth-best conference just because it wanted its precious Big Ten-Pac-10 game. Forget that Georgia-USC or West Virginia-USC would have been phenomenal games.

All the Rose Bowl had to do was ask permission from the Sugar Bowl and it could have taken Georgia.

Instead, fans were treated to USC’s 49-17 rout of the Illini.

This isn’t an attack on Illinois, which had a great regular season and should have a bright future under head coach Ron Zook. But watching that team during the season, it never seemed like that was a BCS bowl team.

It’s difficult to say who deserved it more than Illinois, though. Can anyone really make a claim for the Arizona State team that fell on its face in the Holiday Bowl?

But this isn’t about whether or not Illinois deserved an at-large bid either.

It is about tradition mattering more than putting on a great contest.

Is the Rose Bowl somehow wacky enough to believe that selecting Georgia, West Virginia or Oklahoma would have kept the game from selling out? Conversely, it would have been one of the hottest tickets during bowl season to see one of those three teams challenge the Trojans.

The Fiesta Bowl, between Oklahoma and WVU, was at least a strong match-up on paper even if the Mountaineers sprinted away into the desert night.

On New Year’s Day, however, fans got the shaft.

Thanks, Rose Bowl, for giving us the USC-Illinois dismantling.

An even greater thanks for leaving the Sugar Bowl with little choice but to take Hawaii to oppose Georgia.

All that did was produce an equally thorough 41-10 beating from Georgia.

What would have been so bad about facing USC with someone worthy of a Rose Bowl bid.

When the Rose Bowl made the decision to join the BCS, it should have checked its ego at the door. Instead, it continues to demean the system and line the pockets of sometimes unworthy conferences.

And while that was certainly an unforgivable error from the Rose Bowl executives, it wasn’t the worst of the bowl season.

It doesn’t matter that Kansas defeated Virginia Tech Thursday night. The Jayhawks had no business in the Orange Bowl.

Yes, they lost just one game all season, but that was with a schedule ranked 109^th among 119 teams. Kansas played in one of the nation’s best conferences, but didn’t play Oklahoma or Texas – two of the best three teams in the conference.

The Jayhawks played one ranked team all year – Missouri – and lost.

On the other hand, Missouri beat Illinois and Kansas but lost to Oklahoma twice.

The Tigers were punished for qualifying for the Big XII Championship and losing to a good Sooners team.

After losing the second time, the Tigers, ranked No. 1 to start at the beginning of Bowl Selection Sunday, were banished from the BCS. What’s worse, the team that Missouri had beaten the week before, Kansas, received the spot the Tigers deserved.

Every year, the computers seem to receive the most blame for the BCS’ failures. The NCAA often responds by tweaking the formulas and the system.

What will the NCAA higher-ups do now that the humans are messing things up?

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