Sunshine State Has the Key

The exact city doesn’t matter. It could be TALLAHASSEE or GAINESVILLE or, once again, MIAMI. When you’re talking college football, it doesn’t take long before some town, some school, some team from this state enters the conversation.

Forget the complicated bowl championship series calculations. The easy-to-remember formula for winning college football’s national championship can be broken into two parts: be from Florida or beat a team from Florida.

It has been that way for most of the 1990s. In the 1991 season, Miami won the Associated Press poll. In 1992, the first year of the old bowl coalition, Alabama beat the Hurricanes in the Sugar Bowl to win the national championship.

The next season, Florida State beat Nebraska in the Orange Bowl for the national championship. Nebraska won the next two championships by defeating Miami and Florida in bowl games. In the 1996 season, Florida rebounded to win a championship (beating rival Florida State in the Sugar Bowl to cap it).

Last season Tennessee pulled off a rare double-whammy, beating Florida in the regular season and Florida State in the Fiesta Bowl to claim the title.

There’s an easy way to cut out a lot of the posturing, crying and convoluted poll-taking that messes up college football.

Just let the Florida schools play a round-robin tournament among themselves, then have the winner take on the top-ranked team from the rest of the country. You can’t say the current system makes any more sense.

The best of the Florida schools almost always stands among the best in the country. If a team from outside the state can beat them, in my mind, that school would have as legitimate a claim to the national championship as anyone.

On Saturday, Florida was the focal point of the college football universe again.

Top-ranked Florida State avenged its only 1998 regular-season defeat by beating North Carolina State, 42-11. Penn State kept its championship hopes alive with a late touchdown for a 27-23 win in Miami. And in the nightcap, Florida held off Tennessee, 23-21.

The odds are pretty good that we’ll see either Florida State or Florida in the Sugar Bowl for the matchup of the top two teams in the BCS rankings. The only reason we know we won’t see both of them there is because they face each other in Gainesville on Nov. 20.

Miami threatened to crash the party too, until Penn State quarterback Kenny Thompson found Chafie Fields for a 79-yard touchdown pass play with 1:41 remaining to snatch what would have been a 23-20 Miami victory away from the Hurricanes. But the Hurricanes still can alter the national-championship picture when they play Florida State in Tallahassee on Oct. 9.

The truth is, the Florida schools have indelibly etched their marks on the portrait of college football. They are blessed with an abundance of in-state talent. The best athletes in Florida are focused on football more than, say, basketball. The state doesn’t produce many basketball stars, a task that falls to cold-weather cities such as Chicago, Detroit and New York.

The Florida teams caused schools such as Nebraska and Ohio State to get some speedy defensive backs and receivers to go along with those big, plodding linemen. Once those Midwestern schools got with the program, they were able to compete for championships again.

The Florida schools even changed the rules and politics of the sport. Many credit the trash-talking Hurricanes with bringing about the excessive celebration and unsportsmanlike-conduct penalties that currently occupy the rule books.

Saturday, the Florida schools provided a quick referendum on national-championship contenders. Penn State’s still in, Tennessee is out. The problem for the Volunteers is what their loss did to them in the Southeastern Conference standings. Now they need Florida to lose two conference games just for the Volunteers to gain a spot in the SEC championship game.

If Penn State had lost it would have seriously jeopardized its title hopes, which again points out the fallacies of a playoff-less sport.

One loss and a team’s championship hopes can be over, in some cases even before a school begins classes.

The BCS supporters like to say that brings an added excitement to each Saturday, that the college football season is really one big playoff, or tournament.

That’s not true. A real tournament either puts everyone on equal footing or lets teams earn advantages such as home field or byes on the basis of regular-season performance.

A real tournament wouldn’t punish a school such as Tennessee simply because it’s an odd-numbered year and thus Florida’s turn to host the teams’ annual battle. Coach Steve Spurrier surmised that the home-field advantage made the difference in Saturday’s game (“The Swamp prevailed,” he said), and he’s probably right.

The NCAA needs more work on its method of determining a Division I-A champion. Meanwhile, the rest of the nation has to come up with new ways to compete with the schools from Florida.

*

J.A. Adande can be reached at his e-mail address: j.a.adande@latimes.com.