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The national championship almost certainly will consist of LSU playing Alabama again despite ongoing politicking and hand-wringing.
That is not necessarily the wrong outcome. Nor is it necessarily the right one.
It is merely the one given to us by the BCS, and therefore we should be inclined not to trust it. The BCS has a lot of objectives; none is finding the two best or most worthy teams for its championship game.
The system for determining that is a playoff, and a playoff is the nemesis of the BCS. Their game is what is more commonly known as a concession, giving up on a meaningless point to protect what really matters. And what really matters to the BCS is playing a four-corner offense on introducing a playoff format to the sport's postseason. They give us a championship game, and we are supposed to let the rest of the Ponzi scheme that is the bowls keep churning out money.
The fraud of this system has been taken down every way possible, with this weekend of championship games simply the most recent egregious example of how broken college football is.
Championship weekend in college football only kind of, sort of matters.
I say this as one of the idiots flying to Atlanta for an SEC championship game between LSU and Georgia where the only thing hinging on the outcome is whether the rich get richer. Win or lose Saturday, LSU is playing for the national championship. Its schedule is too tough, its dominance too complete not to. The Tigers have earned it, even with a loss. So the thrill of Saturday is seeing whether Georgia earns the SEC another share of BCS bowl cash.
That said, it is better than Oregon playing a .500 UCLA team with an already-fired coach as the Ducks clobbered the Bruins 49-31. And it is much better than playing for The Trophy That Is No Longer Named After Joe Paterno before a small crowd of friends, family and Groupon subscribers in the Big Ten championship game.
In fact, the only game of championship weekend that matters is not a championship game at all. The Bedlam Game, featuring Oklahoma and Oklahoma State, merely pits rivals with the Cowboys needing a victory so they can argue they have five victories against Top 25 teams to Alabama’s mere two.
Yes, college football is coming to its yearly stirring conclusion — a philosophical debate about the merits of various one-loss, big-conference teams and whomever the undefeated team from the unwashed conference happens to be that year.
This year it is Houston. The Cougars have no shot.
My personal favorite is Boise State. Give Broncos coach Chris Petersen a month and he gives LSU a game. In an even mildly fair world, their body of work should qualify them for a chance. It won't.
The ACC has Virginia Tech. This feels like a joke to me.
What is possibly the best team in the country at the moment, USC, is banned from playing even though all the people responsible for the punishment are nowhere to be found. What a great world this is where the Trojans are done because a player long since gone, Reggie Bush, took cash he should have been legally paid, and Penn State is bowl-eligible despite apparently enabling an alleged child molester.
College football sure does have its priorities straight.
This leaves Stanford and Oklahoma State as the one-loss teams that are not going to supplant Alabama in the championship game but are being debated like it is a possibility anyway. There is a dichotomy even there. Oklahoma State is considered the good choice. Stanford is not, although, for the life of me, I cannot figure out why.
And this is the supposedly greatest bleeping sport where every game matters. Every game except those played on the final week of the season — and all to protect a bunch of old guys in matching pastel blazers and their ridiculously named bowls from having to find different ways to justify golf junkets with complicit athletic directors and university presidents.
The best part of having Oklahoma State in the mix is Cowboys coach Mike Gundy has shown a willingness to rant when properly provoked. Go get 'em, Mike, because your one loss is sure to be judged inferior to Alabama's one loss by people like Craig James.
James is the guy who thinks it’s totally acceptable to hire a PR firm and use his position as a football announcer for The Worldwide Leader to help get a coach fired to settle a vendetta that began with playing time for his son. Absolutely he is who you want to give a ballot to, allowing him to help determine who plays for the national championship.
I'd do a takedown of his most recent rankings, but Ty Duffy already did so at The Big Lead. Read it, then wonder how any logical sports-loving human can defend this system, a system that allows a great sport to crescendo in a debate that gives weight to voices like James'. There are those who argue metrics.
There are those who argue the absurdity, and having a Twitter handle of @everygamematters as you are about to stage a championship that contradicts that point is the height of absurdity. There are those who argue about the bias against non-BCS conference schools. There are those who argue the superiority of the chosen conferences.
There are those who change their arguments like what the SEC is doing.
They whined like hell about the idea of a rematch between Ohio State and Michigan in 2006. Now they are whining like hell for a rematch between LSU and Alabama.
I see you, Crimson Tide fans. The system makes hypocrites of us all.
And I will say this again: I do not think ‘Bama-LSU 2.0 is necessarily a bad idea. I know this puts me in the minority, but I rather enjoyed the first game, a taut defensive battle decided in overtime. It is not so much that this is the wrong matchup as it is arrived at dubiously.
And by dubiously, I mean without a playoff.
The argument for a playoff is so obvious that to make it feels idiotic. And so we trudge into this championship weekend and pretend games about nothing are better than something.
You can follow Jen Floyd Engel on Twitter, email her or like her on Facebook.
