BCS: Bowl Confusion Series

How lucky we all are to have the Bowl Championship Series, launched a few years ago to end all the confusion over a college football champion.

Why if it weren’t for the BCS computer with all its bits and bytes, we’d have to use humans and you know how unreliable they can be.

The coaches and writers polls put Oklahoma No. 1 and Miami No. 2, which would seem to make the championship game in the Orange Bowl a simple matter.

Not so fast.

All that high-priced circuitry in BCS headquarters decided that Florida State is the second best team in America and slipped the Seminoles ahead of the Hurricanes even though Miami beat Florida State this season.

Florida State’s margin was 0.32 points, hard to figure since Miami beat the Seminoles by three. Maybe it was FSU’s impressive march through the Atlantic Coast Conference and heavyweight opponents like Duke and North Carolina--the Seminoles scored 63 in each of those games--or the 59 they managed against Maryland and the 58 they had against North Carolina State.

The BCS conclusion left Miami on the outside looking in for the Jan. 3 championship game being played in its own back yard. If the Hurricanes want a part of the Orange Bowl showdown, they’ll have to buy a ticket.

To Miami coach Butch Davis’ credit, he didn’t hack his way into the BCS hardware and rearrange a few of the wires. Instead, he took the high road.

“Regardless of how it turned out, it can’t take anything away from our great season,” he said. “We won nine in a row and did everything we think we could have.”

Well, almost everything.

Miami made the mistake of losing to Washington early in the season. If the Hurricanes feel snubbed, they ought to check out the Huskies, who were totally ignored in the title talk and left to fend for themselves in the Rose Bowl against Purdue. Washington, though, has no beef. It lost to Oregon, which lost to Wisconsin, and so forth and so on.

All of this is part of a strange set of circumstances that links teams with common opponents. Follow the dotted lines the way Sports Illustrated did a couple of weeks ago and it could lead to a championship game between Portland State and Army.

Despite the best efforts of the BCS, college football’s postseason remains a convoluted mess.

Bowl games used to be reserved for regular-season achievement. Now the landscape is cluttered with mediocre teams in a fistful of why-bother bowls.

Under the rules, teams must win more games than they lose to qualify for a bowl. So we have teams with 6-5 records running around--three of them in Hawaii.

The Aloha Bowl invited Boston College and Arizona State, both 6-5. That kind of mediocre season ought to be an invitation to go home, not spend a week in the sun at Waikiki.

The Oahu Bowl has Virginia (6-5) against Georgia (7-4). Of the four teams heading to Hawaii, Georgia has the best record. The university was so impressed, it fired coach Jim Donnan last week.

Want a few more candidates to ignore?

Try the Las Vegas Bowl, which spared no expense by inviting at-home UNLV (7-5) to play Arkansas (6-5).

Then there’s the Motor City Bowl with Marshall (7-5) against Cincinnati (7-4). And the Galleryfurniture.com Bowl with Texas Tech (7-5) against East Carolina (7-4).

West Virginia went 6-5 and earned a trip to the Music City Bowl to play Mississippi (7-4). The Micronpc.com Bowl proudly offers Minnesota (6-5) against North Carolina State (7-4).

UCLA (6-5) is in the Sun Bowl. LSU (7-4) is in the Peach Bowl and Pittsburgh (7-4) is in the Insight.com Bowl. Fresno State (7-4) is in the Silicon Valley Classic and the Independence Bowl has two 7-4 teams, Texas A&M; vs. Mississippi State.

All of this plays right into the come-one-come-all state of mind that permeates college sports these days.

They’ll invite 65 teams to the NCAA basketball tournament this season when perhaps 12 of them have a legitimate chance of winning. The others are so much window dressing, like most of the why-bother bowl games.