National Champions. Says Who?

Only in the small-minded world of big-time college football would we have to defend the USC Trojans’ status as two-time defending champions.

That’s what they are and I’m sick of BCS-blinded fools trying to say otherwise just because Louisiana State won a (not the) national championship two years ago.

If anything, it’s technically accurate to call the Trojans three-time defending champions. They have finished atop something called the Matthews Grid Ratings every year since the 2002 season.

That’s the thing about college football. If someone says you’re a champion, you’re a champion.

There is no official national championship for Division I-A. The NCAA has a method of declaring Matt Leinart temporarily ineligible for the Rose Bowl because he looked into a camera said “SportsCenter is next” after the UCLA game, but it doesn’t have a method for determining a national championship.

If you look at the past champions on the official NCAA website it simply refers you to the champions selected by various polls and statistical rankings. Sometimes there are as many as five “champions” for a single year. There have been only eight completely unanimous champions since 1949.

The Associated Press has named champions since 1936 and has emerged as the most commonly accepted weekly ranking system among the media. That’s probably because it’s by the media. We like ourselves that way, and trust ourselves a lot more than we trust the coaches who have only a slight conflict of interest in these things.

According to the AP, the Trojans were the national champions for the 2003 and 2004 seasons.

Some – particularly folks in Baton Rouge, La. – say the LSU Tigers are the 2003 champions because LSU beat Oklahoma in the BCS-designated championship game at the Sugar Bowl. That’s what a mixture of computer rankings said. So did a poll of the coaches. Then again, the coaches were contractually obligated to say so.

Don’t be fooled by the hype. The Bowl Championship Series is not THE national championship. All the BCS represents is a way to get the teams it selects as No. 1 and No. 2 to play each other.

LSU’s championship is no more or less valid than USC’s.

You want a false label? Here’s one: calling this the 2006 Rose Bowl. There are many debates about exactly when Jesus Christ was born, but the closest thing to an agreement is that it was NOT in the year we call 1 A.D.

But at this point we’re too far along to fix it (this would make the Y2K scare look like a simple programming correction), so we all just roll the way it is.

If we can put ourselves on the same calendar, let’s all get on the same page.

Back-to-back national championships for USC, trying for three in a row.