This is brought on by nothing more than some general complaining around the Web, likely to become louder, about the fact that the invincible Southern Cal Trojans and the Texas Longhorns were somehow deprived of a chance to play in the BCS Title Game.
Get a grip.
I don't like the way the BCS does things, though I'm not sure I have a workable solution seeing as how I don't want a multi-game playoff. That said, the only team that has ever had a legitimate gripe about missing the BCS Title Game is 2004 Auburn. (If you want to be generous, I suppose you could throw in 2004 Utah and 2006 Boise State, but I digress.)
Because, you see, all but one time in the 11 editions of the BCS, there has been a relatively simple formula for getting into the title game from one of the six auto-bid conferences: Win your games. That is completely in your control. Win every game you play, and your ticket is all but punched.
Texas can't blame the pollsters for missing the title game this year; nor can Southern Cal. Because the pollsters don't play the games and don't slip up against lesser competition. (And, by the way, where is the preliminary wailing over the fate of Alabama, who won more regular season games than anyone else in the country, then lost respectably to a Florida team that was obliterating every other team that dared to face them?)
If either Texas or Southern Cal had ended this year as the only undefeated BCS team in the country, they'd be in the Championship Game. But they couldn't, and in fact they lost to teams who were, in all likelihood, inferior. Texas couldn't beat a Texas Tech team that couldn't even stay on the same field with the Oklahoma Sooners that the Longhorns were supposedly so much better than. Southern Cal couldn't beat Oregon State, a team that got waxed by the same Penn State team that the Trojans dismantled Thursday.
Are Oklahoma and Florida the best one-loss teams in the country? On that, the BCS critics are probably right: We might never know.
But, please, spare me the whining about how unfair this outcome is to Southern Cal or, should the Longhorns win Monday, to Texas.
Both had a chance to make sure no could deny them the right to play for the championship. They blew it. And they have no one to blame but themselves.
