At the sports desk: college football--who's # 1?

Apparently the pollsters will say Florida is, given their victory over Oklahoma last night in the BCS "National Championship" game. But the coaches of Texas, USC, and Utah say otherwise.

Look, this system is about as imperfect as you can get. I think Texas should have been in the championship game--they beat Oklahoma during the regular season, and IMO there wasn't sufficient reason to discount that result, when clearly it came down to either Texas or Oklahoma as Florida's opponent. Plus, you have the fact that Utah went unbeaten AND beat Alabama in the Sugar Bowl; that these computer rankings obviously are imperfect; that you have teams in the championship game having to wait over 30 days before the game is played--you can't tell me that choppy, mistake-filled game last night wasn't affected by the long layoff; and that aren't there tons of people out there who'd LOVE to see how Utah or USC or Texas would do against Florida?

We simply don't have a good system to determine a college football national champion.
Maybe folks should see it this way: don't worry about who's a college football national champion. Instead, can't we agree--Utah; Texas; Southern Cal; and Florida, just to start with, all had very, very outstanding seasons this year. And leave it at that.

At the sports desk: the beauty of the college football bowl system

The father of Heisman hopeful Graham Harrell puts it this way:

"“Now I know people say how much it works for basketball, but I think football is different. Is it really better for the kids to have a playoff or for at least half of them to go to a bowl game and say, ‘We won the Gator Bowl, the Cotton Bowl, whatever bowl.’ You have U.S.C. and Penn State going to the Rose Bowl, whoever wins that game — that’s something those kids can talk about the rest of their lives. They finished by winning something with a name, a tradition. They got to play in the Rose Bowl, not just the quarterfinals."

I have a lot of sympathy with that. Who can't be happy for, say, a Navy football team this year that, once again, executed their option offense so well, went 8-4 against a tough schedule, and will have a chance to cap off a good season with a bowl victory? And there are plenty of other schools who can say the same thing, and will have that chance as well. The problems in college football--the unfairness of a Texas or a Texas Tech being left out of the national championship picture right now despite their records and accomplishments--vex me. But at the same time I don't want to see the college football bowls go away.

That's why I'm in favor of some kind of "plus one." Play all the bowls, play the BCS bowls--and then after all that's played out, have one more game, with #1 playing #2, 1 and 2 being sorted out with bowl results to go on. Still not perfect. But better--and it would keep all the other bowls, too.