Bowled under

BCS leaves a lot to be desired

The wonderful thing about the Bowl Championship Series is that there is absolute unaninimity of opinion: Apart from the people who have dreamed it up, everybody loves the idea of the Bowl Championship Series. There's only one problem: The Bowl Championship Series is a lie. It is not a series at all. It is just one game for the national title -- played by the two teams decreed by a combination of various votings and computers. And everybody hates that. Really, it is the Bowl Championship Duel, and, invariably, every year -- like this one -- one of the teams chosen to be a duelist is a disputatious choice.

The whole bowl system is idiosyncratic, anachronistic and, yes, hypocritical. There's really nothing like it anywhere in sports. Every other title everywhere in the world is settled by some competitive system wherein the qualifiers first are decided and then settle matters on the field. Every other NCAA sport determines its champion in this fashion -- including the lesser football divisions. But then the NCAA suddenly pretends to get religion and whines that Division I-A football players can't spend too much time away from their studies to compete in a playoff series. Oh, please.

The bowl system is also unique in the world in that after the regular season is completed, there is a hiatus of as much as five weeks when teams only practice. You play a whole season of once-a-week games, and then suddenly only work out for a month. It's perfectly insane. But, of course, that's one of the dirty little secrets of the bowl system. There are 25 bowls, which means that 50 coaches are essentially given the divine right to keep their teams together, hold practices and, effectively, plan for next season. Obviously, their scholar-athletes are devoting themselves conscientiously to their studies during this long bowl gestation period.

The bowls are not either, we may say, a level selection field. Teams with better records are often passed over for teams who have big-spending fans more inclined to travel with the team to the bowl city. This sort of tacit corruption now has been superceded by an even more blatant demand for indulgences. In some bowls, schools are requested to pay several hundred thousand dollars in so-called "sponsorship fees." Don't pony up, we'll invite another school. If this was dirty politics instead of pure sports, we would call this sort of thing a bribe.

Oh, well. The rich teams and their elite conferences get an extra game and extra weeks of practice and some bowl booty and their fans get a vacation -- all of which perpetuates the rotten system. And two teams -- two teams only -- are ordained by a system that can only be understood by people who also are smart enough to program their VCRs. But these two chosen ones alone play for our national championship. This year the anointed pair is Miami and Nebraska -- which pleases almost nobody east of Omaha, west of Scottsbluff, south of McCook and north of the Sand Hills.

Then again, it's all in the name of higher education. And a chance for the family to gather together and watch Louisiana Tech and Clemson square off in the Crucial.com Humanitarian Bowl on New Year's Eve. Not even Don King could dream up our collegiate bowl system.

Sports Illustrated senior contributing writer Frank Deford is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com and appears each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. His new novel, The Other Adonis (Sourcebooks Landmark), is available now at bookstores everywhere.

The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer.

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