A Rose by BCS Name Not Nearly as Sweet

The traditional Rose Bowl matchup between the Pacific 10 and Big Ten is taken away. A team that suffers a humiliating loss, giving up 62 points in its last game, makes it to the “national championship game.” A quarterback wins the Heisman Trophy over quarterbacks who threw for more than twice as many yards in the season.

I can’t bear it anymore. Next year I will get my football on Sundays.

Phillip Parra

Pasadena

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OK, so if I understand this correctly in BCS logic....

Team A beats Team B. Team A wins the conference title, but Team B gets to go to the BCS championship game? I’m sure like most people with a brain (sorry, Nebraska fans, that leaves you out), we feel not only is this a travesty but further proof that a playoff is the only way.

Erik Weinberger

West Hills

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Top 10 meanings of BCS:

10. Begin Changing Soon.

9. Bring Conference Seconds.

8. Broken, Can’t Save.

7. Buy Cornhusker Souvenirs.

6. Belittled College Showdown.

5. Bowl Competition Shenanigans.

4. Buffaloes’ Crazy Season.

3. Broken Computer System.

2. Beat Coaches Silly.

1. Better Count Somemore.

Chris Darden

Huntington Beach

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Good lord, quit your whining. As soon as it became apparent we wouldn’t have 11-0 Miami vs. 11-0 Nebraska in the Rose Bowl, you started whining about the BCS and lamenting that we won’t have the usual Michigan-Washington matchup in the game (zzzzzz.) This after Chris Dufresne spent the entire season writing breathlessly about the BCS standings and possibilities. Now your headline isn’t about a terrific and dramatic sporting event (LSU-Tennessee), but instead is an editorial: “Badly Conceived System.”

We’ll still have a compelling matchup between Miami and Nebraska. It beats what the Pac-10 and Big Ten could offer any time. Grow up, quit whining and enjoy the game on Jan.3.

Ian Heath

Lake Forest

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Flag Chris Dufresne for unsportsmanlike conduct and Bill Plaschke for piling on in their BCS diatribes this week.

Where is the controversy? Miami, the only undefeated team, will play Nebraska, the best of the remaining one-loss teams, for the national championship.

What about fast closers, like Colorado? Unless colleges revert to a four-game exhibition season, like the NFL, a team’s first game should be just as important to its evaluation as its last one.

So give this one up, guys, and go back to what you do best: sharing your secret fears about all those red-clad Nebraskans heading this way in the coming weeks on their tractors.

Bill Strateman

Laguna Beach

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21st century theories by Jeff Sagarin and David Rothman:

Nebraska is a better team than Colorado.

Texas is a better team than Colorado.

All three teams are better than Oregon.

And the Earth is burrito shaped.

Kevin Barry

Santa Monica

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With the outcry among the nation’s sporting press concerning the unfairness of Nebraska playing for a national title instead of Colorado, I am left to wonder just which side of this fence these folks were sitting on back in 1978, when they chose Alabama over USC. Both teams finished with one loss and USC had won the head-to-head matchup, 24-14. Back then, these same muffin-heads (both the AP writers and the Football Writers Assn.) voted for the team that lost the matchup.

In an interesting twist, the same coaches’ poll that rescued USC will be obligated to hand its crown to Nebraska, should Nebraska win the Rose Bowl. My, how the worm turns.

Eric Hainline

Santa Ana

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It’s not surprising that MIT or Caltech has never produced a Heisman Trophy winner when one considers the shortcomings of their academic programs. I surveyed the top 20 so-called “scientific” institutions of higher learning in the U.S. and not a single one offers a degree in Eric Crouch’s major of exercise science.

Some hidebound traditionalists might argue that exercise science isn’t a “pure” science like physics or chemistry, but what do they know about football?

As soon as MIT and the other laggards wake up and take a cue from Nebraska, they may be playing for the national championship sooner than anyone could have imagined.

Allen E. Kahn

Playa del Rey

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With many young Americans huddling around the world on a peace mission, I can’t get excited about who gets to huddle on Jan. 3 in Pasadena.

Until I hear a head coach expressing his thanks that he and his boys are not in the service, the BCS controversy has me thinking, who cares?

Kevin Park

North Hollywood

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How can any relevancy be placed upon a football game that comes so long after the parade associated with it? Gee, it’ll be 61/2 weeks since they had the Doo Dah parade.

Tony Berardinelli

North Hollywood