To those who say the BCS needs to be modified, I say: You're right.
Of course, the devil's in the details, and maybe there are a lot of ways to work it, but I'm going to focus on rectifying the things that bunched up more boxers amongst the football crazies in society than anything else.
First: A team that didn't win its conference championship got into the title game (yea verily - was even ranked No. 1).
Second: A team lost its Quality Win Bonus because it had to beat the ranked team again, thus knocking it out of the Quality Win Bonus range.
Third: (And I figured this one out all by my widdle sewf) There is no distinction between losing a close game to a quality team and laying an egg against a turkey.
The first one is relatively easy, despite the fact that there are two methods used by the various conferences to decide championships. In order to reward those teams who win their conferences, simply deduct a point from their BCS total.
The last two are a little trickier and would involve freezing the BCS ratings positions for the Quality Win Bonus at whatever they are for the last regular-season games.
The regular season position freeze would also be used for the soon-to-be-controversial Quality Loss Adjustment. The idea here is to award one-tenth of a point to a team defeated by the number 1 BCS rated team - in essence adding only nine-tenths of a point for that loss. Like the Quality Win Bonus, the adjustment would float week to week depending on the ranking of the victor.
Unlike the QW Bonus, the QL Adjustment would include all teams in the BCS top 25, with adjustment increments of 0.004. A loss to BCS number 1 is adjusted by 25 x 0.004 or 0.100 while losses to the number 5 team gives an adjustment of 0.080, 10th would be 0.040, 20th 0.020, etc.
If these tweaks had been in place for the 2003 season, the top 4 teams and their scores would have been:
LSU - 4.54 Take LSU's final, unadjusted BCS Subtotal (FUBS) of 5.99, subtract 1 point for being SEC Champs, subtract 0.4 points (just once) for Georgia's 7th place ranking in week 7, and subtract .048 to adjust the loss to (week 7) number 14 Florida.
USC - 5.15 The Trojans finished with a FUBS of 6.15, subtract 1 point for being Pac 10 champs, with no QWB and no QLA.
Michigan - 9.57 UM had a FUBS of 11.23, less 1 Big Eleven champ point, a QWB for defeating over5thranked Ohio State of 0.6 and a QLA of .056 for (week 7) number 12 Iowa.
Oklahoma - 5.07 To their 5.61 FUBS, no conference champ award, but a QWB of 0.5 against (week 7) number 6 Texas and a QLA of 0.044 for their humiliating loss to week 7 number 15 KSU.
So you see, my dear friends, even conceding both of the subjective poll rankings to USC, they would still have been the third place team, trailing number 2 Oklahoma by 8/100ths (instead of trailing LSU in the actual BCS by 16/100ths) - closer, but no Sugar.
None of this matters a whit to the Associated Pandering Sportwrithers of America whose only commitment to the BCS is to pay it lip service when it's conducive to ratings, readers, viewers and advertisers. And let's face it, the meager media markets of Louisiana and Oklahoma COMBINED can't touch the highly populous mega-metropolitan Southern California market.
Like the man said, bowl games are all about the bucks.
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