Bryan Burwell

Call me the party pooper. Let me be the first to tell you that any day now, the veil of confusion will be lifted and everyone will see the real story line of this crazy, mixed up college football season. Right now, you’re all being blinded by the feel-good sense of how much fun it is to see the football establishment spun on its head.

You think it’s so cute that this is the year Notre Dame and Nebraska are homecoming patsies. You snicker at the idea that Kansas and UConn — noted basketball powers — have ditched their notorious football lightweight status at the same time. Who doesn’t love how every week the Top 10 looks like a revolving door, and that all sorts of unlikely names have worked their way into the Bowl Championship Series spotlight and so many familiar ones have worked themselves right out?

Blinded by the light, we love embracing the idea that football historians will ultimately call this college football’s most radical season in generations. I, on the other hand, see things a bit differently, and any day now, maybe the rest of the football world will catch on, too.

As much fun as it’s been watching this unpredictable season develop, the party pooper would like to ask everyone to notice that it’s time to recognize college football has a dirty little secret:

The Season of the Unpredictable it’s going to end just like all the others.

A lousy computer — not a championship playoff — is still going to decide who belongs in the national championship game.

So tell me again, why is everyone so happy?

With a little more than three weeks to go before all the best seats in college football’s musical chairs postseason bowl selection process are occupied, I still don’t like the way it’s being done.

It doesn’t matter if you’re an LSU fan, an Oregon backer (or quacker), a Kansas Jayhawk fanatic, or your heart belongs to Oklahoma, West Virginia, Missouri or even Hawaii. The chances of the BCS bowl selection process being executed properly are next to impossible.

The regular season has been a blast, but ultimately, the postseason is a fraud. We’ll spend the rest of the season waiting on are mistakes to happen, not greatness to be achieved. We’re waiting on spreadsheets to spit out confusing calculations on strength of schedules, or faceless voters to cast weekly ballots that are determined on whims and suppositions, regional and historic personal prejudices.

The BCS formula for determining a national champion is still too flawed. They think they have it right, but they’re not even close.

It doesn’t matter how the regular season works out, there will be at least three, maybe four more teams among this season’s elite teams who can justifiably lay claim to a spot in the championship mix. But the truth is, once again, someone is going to be left on the outside with no chance to compete for the BCS championship hardware.

I keep hearing all the BCS analysts and college football talking heads reciting who they think will be in the title game in New Orleans in January. Some say it will be LSU versus Oregon. Some say the winner of the Big 12 championship gauntlet deserves to get into the mix. Others wonder if Big East leader West Virginia could find its way into the game.

No matter what scenario that you can create, I’m sure I can tell you how some equally deserving team will be left outside the BCS title game.

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If LSU and Oregon run the table on their regular seasons and finish the regular season with only one defeat, they’ll probably outsmart the BCS computer and go to the title game. But don’t you think unbeaten Kansas must be sitting here wondering what it must do to overtake higher ranked LSU and Oregon?

So how much sense does it make to you that an undefeated team from a major BCS conference could not qualify for the championship game?

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And if that doesn’t make sense, how does this? Does anyone still think an undefeated team from a non-BCS conference (Hawaii) should be automatically dismissed as unworthy for serious BCS championship conversation because it plays in the so-called lightweight WAC?

Does anyone want to ask Oklahoma what it thinks of Boise State’s ability to hang with the big boys?

Oh there’s so much more that doesn’t make sense.

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Does it make sense that a team like 9-1 Missouri (ranked fifth in the latest BCS ratings) could over the span of the next three weeks, run its record to 12-1 with victories in back-to-back weekends over KU (3^rd in the BCS) and Oklahoma (4^th), and still not be good enough for the BCS computers?

Shouldn’t this unpredictable season be the one that finally proves to all the BCS apologists that the system is more than slightly flawed? Shouldn’t this be the proof that the system of determining the champ is just plain wrong?

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The opponents of any form of a playoff in college football’s upper echelon hide behind flimsy excuses. They want to convince you that if things work out for an LSU vs. Oregon showdown, it’s because the computers tell us that the Pac-10 and the SEC are the two toughest conferences in college football, which means that the two champs must be the two best teams.

But if this volatile season has shown us anything, it’s that conventional wisdom no longer works.

Division I-A football (I still don’t understand that new terminology) needs to determine its champion not by guesswork, but by competition, because competition — not computers — are what sports are supposed to be about.

Winners deserve to be determined on the field, and college football’s top division still doesn’t have a suitable plan to crown its champion, no matter what the BCS apologists will tell you.

It annoys me to realize that we’re about to go through one of the most exciting, unpredictable and worthwhile seasons in the history of modern college football, yet its conclusion will be just like all the other before it.

Predictably inconclusive and sadly too full of “what ifs.”

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