The biggest injustice ever committed by the Bowl Championship
Series (and that’s saying something) occurred on Sunday.
Wonderful. Excellent. Pure joy.
With USC, the No. 1 team in both polls, being left out of the
national championship game, the blueprint has been made for
complete destruction of the BCS bowl system.
A win by USC in the Rose Bowl would lead to a split national
championship, precisely the thing that the BCS was created to
avoid.
The BCS was created for the 1997-98 season largely because of
what happened in 1997 ““Â the last time there was a split
national championship. That year, both Michigan and Nebraska
finished undefeated, but didn’t play each other because they
went to different bowl games. The BCS system was then created to
put the No. 1 and No. 2 teams in the same game.
But the system decided the national championship game based on
two games on Saturday that that should’ve had absolutely
nothing to do with it.
Saturday morning, Notre Dame, a team USC beat, rolled over and
lost to Syracuse 38-12.
After the Oklahoma loss and LSU win in the evening, many BCS
experts predicted that USC needed Hawai’i (another Trojan
opponent) to defeat Boise State Saturday night to finish ahead of
LSU in the final BCS standings.
How ridiculous is that?
A national championship game between Oklahoma, LSU and USC
should never come down to a team outside of the U.S. mainland and a
team who plays its home games on a blue field.
Including the current Oklahoma and LSU over USC debacle, the BCS
formula has messed up the championship game three of the last four
years, and the one year it didn’t mess up was a year in which
two teams (Miami and Ohio State) went undefeated, a championship
game even a five-year-old could’ve picked.
Oklahoma lost its final game of the season 35-7 on Saturday,
leaving most people to think that it should be LSU and USC who
should be in the Sugar Bowl. LSU made beating then No. 5 Georgia
look easy and USC destroyed Oregon State.
The traditional polls, along with many fan polls across the
Internet, all had USC and LSU as the top two teams.
But it will be Oklahoma and LSU in the Sugar Bowl.
“The Rose Bowl is the national championship game for
us,” USC coach Pete Carroll said on ABC’s BCS selection
show.
Oklahoma not only didn’t fall out of the championship game
picture, it remained at No. 1 in the BCS.
The computer rankings, which the BCS all forced not to include
margin of victory as a deciding factor, loved Oklahoma, with only
two of the seven computer rankings removing Oklahoma from the No. 1
spot.
However, USC fans can’t solely blame the computers for the
Trojans not going to the Sugar Bowl.
They should instead blame the way the BCS calculates strength of
schedule. If you took away that component of the BCS formula, USC
would have still been ahead of LSU.
The BCS strength of schedule is made up of two factors: the
cumulative win/loss records of the team’s opponent (66.6
percent) and the cumulative win/loss records of the team’s
opponents’ opponents (33.3 percent). All of the teams’
schedule strengths are then ranked and divided by 25.
This weekend, LSU gained 25 ranking spots over USC. If
USC’s schedule strength was only four spots higher, the
Trojans would be in the Sugar Bowl.
Even though I’m a UCLA fan, I’ll be rooting hard for
USC in the Rose Bowl.
College football desperately needs a playoff system, and
can’t rely on one bowl to give it a national champion.
E-mail Gilbert at gquinonez@media.ucla.edu.