The pox that is the BCS is spreading. No longer does it ruin only the bowl season; its sinister influence is everywhere now. Take the Big 12.... Faced with the decision of how to break the tie between Texas, Oklahoma and Texas Tech to represent the South Division in the Big 12 championship game, the league simply decided to send whichever team the BCS ranked higher. The Big 12 shirked all responsibility for taking care of its own business and gutlessly cowed to a system that has proved unable to select two teams, let alone one.
I heard an expression once, one that I wish I either remembered the origin of or could take credit for: "Who are you going to believe? Me? Or your own lying eyes?" I mention this expression, because as Michael Wilbon explains, understanding how the BCS works and how the Big 12 has managed to perpetrate one of the biggest competitive injustices in modern memory involves nothing if not the willing suspension of disbelief. If Bob Stoops and the University of Oklahoma had any class, they'd recognize that they're the beneficiary of a travesty and decline to have any part of it. Sadly, they're acting as if they were to the manor born and as if they have an absolute right to be playing in the Big 12 Championship game.
Texas Tech beat Texas in the final seconds, and needed home-field advantage to do it. Oklahoma trashed Texas Tech, but had home-field advantage. Texas, in a fabulous game, defeated Oklahoma and did not have home-field advantage. The Longhorns won the annual Red River Shootout in a stadium where the tickets are divided evenly between the two schools.
Texas Tech was humiliated by Oklahoma, leaving Tech out of the equation, most reasonable and unaffiliated folks would agree. And in any sport governed by reason, one would have to say the first tiebreaker goes to the team that won the head-to-head competition. This, of course, is where you can't get presumptuous because college football isn't governed by reason or rational thought.
The computer models, with whatever data they're being fed, say Oklahoma should be ranked ahead of Texas, damn what your eyes see or common sense tells you.
Right; who you gonna believe? The BCS? The Big 12? Or your own lying eyes? And don't even get me started on the whole common sense angle...
Meanwhile, we get a Big 12 Championship that features two teams that Texas beat by double digits. The winner will be the champion of...well, I'm not sure what, really, but a lot of ill-informed people will be calling them "champions".
And here...silly me...I'd always thought that champions were supposed to be determined on the field of play.
