Some Broncos Do Win Big Games

As I noted in an earlier post, there's nothing a real athelete hates more than not being in control of his or her own destiny. The best recent example of this is the royal screwjob that was bestowed on Boise State. People who have been paying attention to the college football bowl system (and I must admit that, in a regular year, I don't give 2 craps about college footbal bowls) will recall that, after the fiascos in 2003 (split national championship) and 2004 (Auburn goes undefeated but still isn't given a shot at the title), the NCAA tweaked the bowl system. The purported purpose of these tweaks was to ensure that the two best teams in the nation always played for the title. Never again (they said) would we have a split championship. Never again (they said) would a team finish the season undefeated and yet be eliminated from any meaningful bowl game.

And then you have this year. Only two teams finished in the Top 10 in the BCS rankings (and anyone who pretends to truly understand the ranking system and who does not have a Ph.D. in math is lying): Ohio and BSU. And guess what, boys and girls? Ohio gets to play for the national championship against a team who DID lose a game (to Auburn, whom any decent college football team can beat), and BSU gets banished to the Corn Chips Bowl to play the #7 team.

For those who have only seen scores and highlights from the Frito Lay Sub-brand bowl, one thing needs to be very clearly stated: the game was nowhere near as close as the score or the SportsCenter highlights would suggest. For 3 quarters, BSU absolutely dominated the game. The fourth quarter was absolutely crazy, on both sides of the ball. Now, let's remember why BSU got banished to the Doritos' cousin's bowl: because they really weren't that great a team; they just had an easy schedule against poor teams, and if they had played a real team, they'd lost. That's what every Big 12 and SEC fan said for the month of December. And then BSU made the Sooners their bitch for 45 straight minutes of football. And all that logic went right out the window. When the Chip Bowl was over, it looked more and more clear that BSU's season wasn't a fluke, that BSU was one of the best teams in the country, and that they might really have deserved a shot at the title.

We all know that no real changes will take place in the BCS. I don't pretend to have any answers, in part because I really don't care. But I do think that BSU's players got screwed. And I think that the BCS people don't really care. And while my apathy is no big deal, theirs is inexcusable.