Whoever Did This to the Trojans Has a Heart of Silicon

My name is Paul, and I’m a college football addict.

I’ve been jacked up on my beloved USC Trojans’ since childhood, when I watched them score 49 unanswered points against Notre Dame and grown men danced like dizzy schoolkids all over Southern California.

I graduated from USC. I taught at USC. I put Tommy Trojan right up there with Elvis and Bill Murray.

And today I’m headed to the Rose Bowl thanks to a nebulous organization called the BCS, which stands for something like Bureaucratic Computer Snafu.

The BCS makes you think of the Wizard of Oz behind his curtain, or the Soviet Union’s Politburo, or the Grassy Knoll. The BCS compiles the “official” national rankings for college football. It feeds wins and losses and, I guess, Good & Plenty into a computer program. The way it works? Only a guy named Gino in Verona, N.J., knows for sure.

This year, the BCS determined that USC’s football team is No. 3, even though coaches (the College Football Coaches Poll) and sportswriters (the Associated Press Writers Poll) say it’s No. 1. Get this, the (human) consensus top team can’t play in the championship game.

That game takes place Jan. 4, at the Sugar Bowl in the New Orleans’ Superdome, with BCS No. 1 Louisiana State playing BCS No. 2 Oklahoma, a team that recently lost a game by 28 points.

And you thought hanging chads were a problem.

As USC Coach Pete Carroll says, the BCS has “some issues.” Maybe the computers caught a virus. Maybe Gino’s blind.

The BCS computers supposedly take into account the strength of each contender’s schedule, and the Pac-10 Conference -- USC is its champion -- didn’t have a stellar season. But are you going to tell me Pamela Anderson is any less desirable because her neighbors are ugly?

Guess what, BCS goons -- I’m on to you. I know all about your East Coast bias and abject jealousy of the West Coast. I haven’t forgotten how you snubbed Oregon a few years ago and Washington before that. I know all about ESPN, the Eastern Sports Network, which can’t bear to drive its College Football Game Day trucks west of Austin.

But here’s the thing: Manifest Destiny worked. The West Coast has been populated, and we play pretty good football. And because the BCS screwed up, I get to bask in Rose Bowl sunshine. No agonizing over hotel rooms and rent-a-cars to watch USC play in a cavern of cement and plastic grass.

All I have to do is roll out of my own bed, and -- yeah OK, you got me -- find a parking place in Pasadena. I can sample plenty of Rose Bowl tailgate parties. At least one USC alum, let’s call him Biff, will be wearing fire-engine-red pants and a canary yellow shirt and singing “Fight on for ol’ S-shshsh C.” I’ll strictly adhere to the Chet Atkins diet: Eat enough barbecue to fill a country singer and his band.

I can be content in the knowledge that the BCS contract is up in a few years. It’ll get what’s coming to it like so many other bad ideas, from New Coke to Milli Vanilli.

And here’s the real beauty part: USC can still snag the AP championship title -- all without subjecting me to a long flight home, with a planeload of Biffs singing “Fight on” through their chicken-wing-filled teeth.

Paul Vercammen, USC ‘83, is news director of KEYT-TV in Santa Barbara and an occasional essayist for the Los Angeles Times Magazine.