It was non-appointment television, sponsored by the BCS.
No, not the bowl matchups it produced or even the half-hour, product-pushing roundtable announcing them on Fox, where edgewise didn’t have a chance to get a word in, but what took place less than 24 hours earlier on another network.
What other sport can cause anything like the embarrassing spectacle from a week ago Saturday night, when No. 1 Missouri and No. 2 West Virginia lost, throwing the computers, pollsters and pundits into disarray and turning SportsCenter into Larry King Live?
Now let’s go to the phones. We have LSU coach Les Miles on line 1.
With the bodies of West Virginia and Missouri not yet cold, Miles felt a TV cameo was necessary for some lobbying to get his team into the title game opposite Ohio State. The coach did well extolling his difficult schedule and fine collection of football players, but then came this:
“We were undefeated in regulation,” said Miles, whose team lost to Kentucky, then to Arkansas, in triple overtime.
This is what the current BCS system does. It forces people to speak and write nonsense, in this case helping put Miles on the 2007 DVD edition of “College Football Coaches Gone Goofy.” It’s a compendium highlighted by Alabama’s Nick Saban pumping up his team by comparing a two-game losing streak to 9/11 and Pearl Harbor (the inspired Crimson Tide laid an uninspired egg in the ensuing Iron Bowl), and Arkansas’ Houston Nutt boiling down Darren McFadden’s Heisman candidacy to a “He’s a football player!” proclamation on national TV that no doubt swayed fence-sitting voters.
Anyway, USC’s Pete Carroll appeared on SportsCenter nine days ago, too, as did Georgia’s Mark Richt, each pushing – begging, really – for enough votes in the polls to move into the championship game.
The only better weekend stumping came from Hillary and Rudy.
We’re told this kind of circus is good for college football – certainly good for ESPN, which can’t be blamed for putting the coaches on – though specifically how the sport benefits hasn’t been fleshed out.
This indefensible system, even now, still has defenders. They range from the predictable – college presidents and conference commissioners – to a surprising number of media advocating the status quo instead of a playoff that makes too much sense.
“The BCS asserts that it is choosing the best possible set of five bowls – and usually achieves that goal,” one contributor wrote on ESPN.com, later stating that the NCAA and the BCS “put it right on the table: selling bowls, not crowning a champion, is the goal.”
Actually, the BCS puts it on the table this way, on its home page (bcsfootball.org):
“The BCS was implemented beginning with the 1998 season to determine the national champion for college football … “
Oops.
