No-brainer for the Buckeyes

Buck up, Buckeyes, there’s still a way for your flattened-by-Florida football team to be declared a national champion.

Pool your money and buy your own nation.

Did you know Sealand is for sale?

Act now and you can be the proud owners of the world’s smallest country, which has its own flag, currency, stamps, passports and national anthem -- but so far, no football team.

It might not look like much, just a wartime fort built on two concrete towers in the North Sea, about seven miles off the east coast of England, just outside Britain’s territorial waters. But it is a nation and it has been put up for sale by its current owners, the 85-year-old self-styled “Prince Roy” Bates and his son, “Prince Michael.”

Sealand has a proud fighting history, having been built during World War II as an antiaircraft base to combat German bombers.

Forty years ago, it was taken over by Bates, a retired British army major, whose family later fought off an eviction attempt by Britain’s Royal Navy and a 1978 effort by a group of German and Dutch businessmen to seize Sealand by force.

All it needs now is a football team.

You’d have to play all your games on the road; Sealand is basically a platform lacking turf of any kind. But it is tailor-made for football betting. Bates told BBC radio that the two-towered facility, with eight rooms in each tower, would be an ideal base for offshore gambling.

Trivia time

With Florida’s 41-14 victory over Ohio State in the BCS title game, the state of Florida has three reigning major-sport national champions -- college football, college basketball (Florida) and the NBA (Miami Heat). When was the last time another state could make the same claim?

Planet Buckeye is history

First Pluto became a non-planet, then it became a verb. And in a vote by the American Dialect Society at its annual meeting last Friday, “plutoed” was chosen as 2006’s word of the year.

To “pluto” is “to demote or devalue someone or something,” similar to what international astronomers did last year when they determined that Pluto did not meet their definition of a planet.

Or, to use it in a sentence: “Ohio State was plutoed by Florida on Monday night.”

Can’t find Pluto on this thing, either

Continuing the recent trend of Americans finding new ways to falter in important international competitions, a truck driven by a U.S. crew in the Dakar Rally got lost in the Spanish city of Seville on Sunday and needed a police escort to get back on track.

In typical fashion, the Americans blamed their failure on someone or something else -- in this case, their global positioning system.

“Two police officers got them on the right road and told them, ‘Watch out when you get to the desert because we won’t be around to help,’ ” Diego Gimenez, a spokesman for Seville city hall, told Bloomberg News.

The three-man team of Thomas Geviss, William Higman and Paul Mischel is the only all-American crew in the truck competition.

The rally, featuring car, truck and motorbike racing categories, began Saturday in Lisbon and ends Jan. 21 in Dakar, Senegal.

The event is reputed to be one of the most demanding in auto racing, which is one reason organizers give competitors a simplified version of GPS. The rest of the way, Team USA might be forced to use rudimentary tools from the Dakar’s pre-GPS days.

A map. And a compass.

Trivia answer

This time last year, the state of Texas had reigning champions in three major sports -- college football and baseball (Texas) and the NBA (San Antonio Spurs).

And finally

Detroit Pistons Coach Flip Saunders told the Cleveland Plain Dealer there’s an advantage to coaching the NBA’s only other Flip, guard Flip Murray.

“In a game, if they’re screaming at Flip and it’s something negative, I always think they’re talking to the other one,” Saunders said. “So, that’s a good thing.”

mike.penner@latimes.com