No. 1 and Done? It Does Not Compute

They shuffled into a cafeteria across the street from the site of their rowdy Saturday victory, silent where they had once been celebrating, stunned where they had once been certain.

Under backward baseball caps and tugged-low ski caps, behind baggy shorts and wrinkled shirts, members of the USC football team looked up at giant TV screens with childlike confusion.

How did this happen? Where did it go?

They went to sleep on Saturday night as the No. 1 team in the America.

They woke up Sunday morning with no chance of winning the bowl championship series national title.

They went to sleep as a living, breathing, title-contending football team.

They woke up as a computer virus.

“I can’t lie,” giant defensive tackle Shaun Cody said softly. “This is really tough.”

Those university presidents who sold college football’s integrity for $900 million and the BCS, they should have heard that voice.

“It’s not right,” receiver Mike Williams said, wincing. “It’s just not right.”

Those fools who program computers that determine a team’s worth without understanding a team’s heart, they should have seen that face.

In the end, the BCS snub that left USC, the top-ranked team in the Associated Press and coaches’ polls, out of the national championship Sugar Bowl is not about schedules or scores, but humans.

It’s about lessons that universities have been entrusted to teach them.

It’s about how the BCS represents an enormous failure of that mission.

“They’re confused,” Coach Pete Carroll said of his players. “It’s hard for them to fathom.”

Not that the Rose Bowl isn’t great. The game against Michigan will be classic. Trojan fans are thrilled to be home.

If USC wins, it has a good chance to be the Associated Press national champion. It would be a shared championship, but so were the Trojans’ last two titles in 1978 and 1974, so who would remember, right?

Except this is a different era. There has, for the last five seasons , been only one championship. And that would be found in this season’s Sugar Bowl.

It holds the trophy these players have grown up admiring. It holds the title these players have grown up understanding.

It is the last game, on the last night, offering the season’s lasting impressions.

No matter what USC does in the Rose Bowl, that perception can be trumped by whatever happens three nights later by two teams that shameless announcers will wrongly bill as the top two teams in the country.

You think USC is a lock to win the AP national championship if it beats Michigan? The media voters have never dropped a top-ranked team after a bowl win, but, then, no contenders have ever been given the last word quite like LSU and Oklahoma will be.

“That’s the big dance,” said Cody. “And we’re not going.”

The Trojans are a marathon runner who, leading into the last lap, is pulled out of the race because a computer said two guys behind him ran prettier.

The Trojans are the kids who ran downstairs at Christmas only to discover that a computer had changed the date to Dec. 26.

How did this happen? Where did it go?

“We wanted to play for the glass football,” said cornerback Marcell Allmond. “That’s what it’s all about, the glass football.”

Oh, but the lessons here are about so much more.

The BCS teaches us that it’s not how you finish, but how you start.

How else to explain how Choke-lahoma can lose its final regular-season game by 28 points and still end up playing for the title?

“That’s not fair at all,” said Allmond. “They lose a game and it doesn’t drop them way down in the rankings? We lost a game early and it dropped us real far. We had to work our tails off to get back up. What does Oklahoma have to do?”

Of the final three teams, USC has the longest winning streak, eight games, but the BCS teaches us that finishing strong doesn’t matter.

The BCS teaches us that it’s all about reputation, not reality.

How else to explain how LSU beats three lightweight programs -- Louisiana Monroe, Western Illinois and Louisiana Tech -- but passes USC in strength of schedule because the Southeastern Conference is considered that much tougher than the Pac-10?

Who decides these things? A couple of guys in a rib joint in Tuscaloosa?

The SEC may indeed be a better conference, but it’s not the NFL, and wouldn’t the NFL be the only league strong enough to outweigh those three easy wins?

“I’ve seen LSU, and all I can say is, those guys are not USC,” said Williams. “Let’s just say, that team has played in some sorority pillow fights.”

All this talk is silly, of course, but the BCS promotes this silliness. It’s about style over substance, it’s about factions over fact.

Everything these college presidents wouldn’t want in their classrooms, they allow in the playoff system of one of their most-watched athletic activities. Shame on them and their cardboard caps, flimsy gowns and whacked priorities.

Folks are saying that this year’s debacle will force a tweaking of the BCS. Tweaking? How about tearing up? How about totaling? Because presidents will never agree to a playoff, go back to the old system. Turns out, that was just fine.

There was controversy, but there was rarely robbery. There was more than one postseason game that truly mattered. There was opportunity for at least four teams to claim the top spot.

In the old system, Pete Carroll did not need to stay up late after Saturday’s victory to watch and pray for Hawaii to beat Boise State to help his strength of schedule.

“That seemed really absurd,” Carroll said of his odd postgame party. “It just didn’t seem right. Could I believe that game had an impact? No, I could not believe it had an impact.”

In the old system, USC would never, never, never have to cheer for Notre Dame on the regular season’s final day, or any other time.

Hawaii lost, of course. So did that Division I-AA team at South Bend, rolling over in Syracuse.

Amazingly, those two games contributed to USC’s downfall nearly as much as the triple-overtime loss to California.

In the old system, that wouldn’t matter.

In the old system, USC would be playing Michigan in the Rose Bowl for a mythical championship that would be more real than anything that comes out of New Orleans next month.

Incidentally, Carroll said that if USC wins the Rose Bowl, he would like to challenge the winner of the Sugar Bowl in the first game of next season.

“Anywhere they want,” he said, walking away. “And that’s how I’ll end this today.”

Of course, by next August, the BCS will note that Michigan has graduated some of its best players, therefore depriving USC of a quality win, dropping the Trojans to 15th in the standings, causing the Sugar Bowl champions to cancel the game for fear of hurting their strength of schedule.

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Bill Plaschke can be reached at bill.plaschke@latimes.com.