Thursday, January 8, 2009

As always, ignore Rick Reilly

It's only hours now until the "official" national champion will be crowned, and you've probably read at least 100 times in the past two weeks about the BCS being a stupid system.

We can all agree that the current method of determining a national champion is ridiculous, of course. But is there a good method?

I'm not going to break down my own hypothetical playoff format (which no one will care about, because everyone and their sister has a plan), nor am I going to explain in detail why I think that the BCS is actually a little better than the old format (matchups, basically).

All I will say is that in this particular season, there are at least five teams that "deserve" to be considered national champion, or at least take part in the discussion: Oklahoma, Florida, Texas, USC and Utah (in no particular order).

We'll never know which team is best, obviously. There are too few meaningful points of comparison, and until every elite teams plays all the others in some sort of round-robin duel to the death (keep dreaming), we'll never know for sure.

So please, try not to take things like Rick Reilly's dissertation on Utah being the "true" national champion seriously. He makes some rational points about the BCS, but the conclusion? Not so much.

We don't have a "true" national champion. We won't have one for the foreseeable future.

But that doesn't mean we won't have great games with brilliant coaches, Heisman-winning quarterbacks and more talent than you could find at The Library in Tempe. The winner of tonight's game will certainly be a "deserving" national champion, just like the other teams mentioned above.

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