Some Final Thoughts on the Mistmatched BCS Game

Fog thick as soup clung stubbornly to the downtown skyline for a few hours Friday morning.

That made it the perfect getaway day for the suits who run the Bowl Championship Series. Because anybody who was going to demand a refund was going to have to do some detective work first.

Miami coach Larry Coker, on the other hand, was easy to find. He showed up promptly at 8 a.m. and took his seat behind a long table in a hotel ballroom some 20 miles east of the Rose Bowl. He was flanked by two of his stars, quarterback Ken Dorsey and receiver Andre Johnson, and just about every national championship trophy available.

“I don’t know what all these are for,” Coker beamed, “but apparently there’s no split national championship.”

No, but there’s some questions regarding just about everything else in college football, beginning with who’s No. 2. That’s what happens when you turn the game over to computers.

Counting Miami’s 37-14 humiliation of Nebraska on Thursday night, the BCS went 0-4 this season as matchmakers. A dating service with that record would be lucky to be in business next month. Maybe that’s why the BCS founding fathers were in such a hurry to extend their contract with college football’s powers-that-be to the end of the 2005 season.

The people who complained long and loud the last few weeks that the Cornhuskers didn’t deserve to be on the same field with Miami turned out to be right.

That was probably true for those who wanted one of the Fiesta Bowl contestants, certainly Oregon and maybe even Colorado, there instead. Plus those who questioned the wisdom of matching LSU and Illinois in the Sugar Bowl and Florida and Maryland in the Orange. And maybe even those who groaned last year when Miami was passed over by the BCS computers that served up Florida State to last year’s national champion, Oklahoma, like some kind of sacrificial lamb.

Maybe it’s true that nobody could have given this year’s Hurricanes team a competitive game. Maybe Miami’s All-American safety Ed Reed was exactly right when he came off the field at the Rose Bowl and said, “There’s a lot of people saying they should be here. If they were, they would have gotten the same treatment.”

Thanks to the BCS, the only thing we know for certain is that Nebraska was not the right team to try.

“This,” Cornhusker coach Frank Solich said Thursday night, “was not the match that everyone dreamed of.”

Solich was clearly tired of fronting for the BCS, of trying to defend a system that used computer rankings to trump the rankings put out by the all-too-human writers and coaches in the traditional polls. Those voters wanted Oregon all along and whatever zeal he’d had at the start of the process went pfffft --like air leaking out of a tire --during a 3-minute, 53-second span in the opening half, when the Hurricanes piled up 20 points.

“Whether or not a matchup with anyone else would have been different,” Solich admitted, “I don’t know.”

Neither did Oregon coach Mike Bellotti.

Thanks to the BCS, he didn’t even get the chance to try.

“The polls had us there,” he said, “but the computers did not.”

When someone asked Coker late Thursday night whether he wanted to play Oregon to settle any remaining doubts, he gave the kind of answer the BCS guys could have scribbled on a note and handed to him:

“Why? We’re the national champions,” Coker said. “It’s settled. We settled it tonight.”

Well, yes and no.

Miami was a worthy champion, the only unbeaten major program in the land and as undisputed a choice as you can have --this side of a playoff.

Ever since the folks who run the BCS got hold of college football, they’ve tinkered with the math until their heads hurt, kept their fingers crossed so long they suffered cramps hoping they got they got the matchups right, and then did more crowing over their handiwork than they had a right to.

But there are signs the paying customers are catching on.

The last two years, the BCS has put together the wrong No. 1 vs. No. 2 game and increasingly marginalized all the other bowls. TV ratings for the first three BCS games this season were down an average 20 percent heading into the Rose Bowl, and it’s hard to imagine that many people sitting all the way through Miami-Nebraska.

There are already promises to look into the process again, to possibly tweak the factors used to determine the teams who qualify for the national championship game. As if bamboozling the audience further is a substitute for the playoffs most fans want.

“The more often you have to change it,” BCS chairman John Swofford said the other day, “the tougher it is for the public to familiarize itself with it and therefore totally accept it.”

Still wonder why fog seems to follow these guys around?