Computer champions

There is one thing wrong with college football’s Bowl Championship Series, and that is the word “championship.”

USC and Texas are not playing Wednesday night for a championship. Championships are won on the field, not in a computer. Sometime on Dec. 3 or Dec. 4 – both teams played their last regular-season games on Dec. 3 – data fed into a computer showed that, statistically, these were the best two teams in the nation and that they would meet Jan. 4 – one month later for the “national championship.”

Since then, the teams have not played a single game. They have practiced, but practice isn’t the same. The edge of winning or losing at the end of three hours is not present in practice. Early in the season, coaches strive to push their teams toward mid-season form. They can’t do that in practice. They have to play an opponent every week, which is also trying to reach mid-season form.

All the teams reach mid-season form, of one kind or another, but a few go on to achieve championship form. They play 10, 11, 12 games, and they win a conference championship, in late November or the first Saturday in December.

Then they get invited, or selected to, a bowl game, and they go sit on their championship form for a month. That has been going on for decades, in the bowl game business, and that was fine. Champions weren’t being determined; regional bragging rights were being settled, while the rest of those in the nation who were interested got to see the best of the best play one more time, which was something to do on New Year’s Day even if the teams performed like they hadn’t played in a month.

The BCS process is exactly the same, except the BCS makes deals with television so that some of the teams who haven’t played in a month get to play their bowl game at 10 in the morning or 9 at night. The feeling develops that, in such a system, the game is secondary to the business.

Yet this USC-Texas game is supposed to be for “the national championship.” The only thing wrong with that is the word “championship.” Ask Pete Carroll. The USC coach this week called the BCS a joke.

It wouldn’t be too difficult to organize a college football championship series. If it had happened this season, most teams at the big-time level would have finished their seasons Dec. 3, as USC and Texas did. On Dec. 4, 16 teams – conference champions and three-odd at-large teams – would have been seeded into a bracket. Seeding lets the polls and their computers participate. USC, the Pac-10 champion, would also have topped the polls and been seeded No 1, at the top of the bracket. Texas would have been ranked second nationally and seeded second, at the bottom of the bracket. If form held true, these two teams would win out and meet in the championship game.

The first round of games would have been played Dec. 10. The quarterfinals would have been Dec. 17, and the semifinals Dec. 24. The last two teams standing would have met for the national championship on Jan. 2 (or on Jan. 1 in years when New Year’s Day doesn’t fall on Sunday), with their competitive edges intact. The championship series would be only part of the college football on holiday television – there is no reason why all the fill-in-the-blank bowls, pitting all the 7-4 and 6-5 teams, would not still be played.

But there is a fatal flaw in a championship series: television loses control. College football becomes just like the baseball World Series: you never know when some donkey like the White Sox is going to knock off the glamour seed and mess up the ratings. Advertisers spend millions on wonderful commercials, and millions more on air time, and on Jan. 2, television is going to give them West Virginia vs. Penn State?

No, television has had a month to put the package together, and on Wednesday night, Jan. 4, a day and date steeped in college football tradition, we are going to see two super but stale teams battle for a championship only a computer would recognize.