Whether or not the BCS is working is a matter of how you define success.  If you want 1 versus 2 playing each other every year then, yes, the BCS is working.  If the goal is to see the best two teams play each other at the end of the year, well then that’s a matter of opinion.

The Bowl Championship series was created eight years ago.  The goal is to have No. 1 and No. 2 play each other for the National Championship.  There has been tweaking and fine tuning over the years to make every effort to get it right.  The problem is you have 11 Conferences and 117 teams in Division 1-A.  So how do we know that we are watching the two best teams?  Answer: we don’t.

Case in point: Boise State.  The Broncos won the Western Athletic Conference and finished a perfect 12-0.  The current and final BCS standings have them eighth, good enough for a Fiesta Bowl invite but they won’t even sniff the national championship.  Why?  Because the voters and BCS computers don’t think that their schedule stacks up to the bigger conference schedules and therefore their team doesn’t stack up against the bigger schools.

All Boise State can do is play their schedule.  And on their schedule was Oregon State, whom they beat 42-14 early in the season.  That same team Oregon State team later beat USC 33-31.  Stay with me now.  If USC had beaten UCLA right now they’d be preparing to play Ohio State for the national championship.

Now I’m not suggesting that because Boise State beat Oregon State and Oregon State beat USC that Boise State would beat USC, that’s not the way it works.  You see that’s the point.  These voters and computers don’t know what would happen any more than the players and coaches do. 

Human beings (with the help of computers) picking two teams out of 117 and saying they are the best two is just as impossible and unfair as those same people picking one team at the end and saying they are best.  So what’s the answer?  I have joined the chorus of those screaming for a playoff.  4 teams, 8 teams, 16 teams, it doesn’t matter to me I’d be for it.  The university presidents seem reluctant to allow that to happen for whatever reason; money, logistics, a genuine concern for the well being of the players.  I really don’t know.

It is all too clear that the system is flawed.  The BCS was supposed to fix the controversies that arose under the old system and it has not.  So if we can’t have a playoff, like every other division playing college football, then I say put it back the way it was.

The regular season in college football has always been the most meaningful in all of sports.  Every single game matters.  Those kids play with pride.  They play with passion.  They are competing for themselves, their teammates and their school.  That hasn’t changed and it won’t; no matter how a national champion is decided.  Everybody is trying to fix something that can’t be broken.  The only thing wrong here are those so caught up in profit and commercialism that they’ve lost sight of what college athletics is about.  It’s about excelling through competition.  Of course that too is a matter of opinion.