I loves me some BCS

Update: As this post led to a spirited discussion on Facebook, I'm adding my final argument there to the bottom of this in an attempt to clarify my point.

I don't want to sit through another season of teeth-gnashing and urgent moral outrage, but I realize I have to, after reading this first shot in the annual mock battle. I think the primary reason we keep arguing about this is because sports columnists often can't come up with an original idea before deadline:

On top of today's Star-Telegram sports section:

Designations are at heart of what's wrong with the BCS
The current BCS system is flawed because it shapes the prejudices against non-automatic qualifiers

(No words scream "read me" like "designations" and "non-automatic qualifiers.")

So, as everyone prepares to dig out and dust off the "BCS UNFAIR!!!" talisman from their complaint box in the storage shed, I'd like to post my yearly "SO FREAKIN' WHAT!!!" statement and get it over and done with.

I spent three days trying to write this, and then realized I was far too bored with the subject to even gather up the motivation for a full-on essay. Here are the points I wanted to make, in a much shorter fashion:

• College football's bowl system manages to pull off what no other sport does -- massive amounts of interest in the regular season and massive amounts of interest in the postseason. I hear people talking all the time about how great the NHL playoffs are. Yeah, only in contrast to the regular NHL season, which no one even bothers paying attention to.
  
• Because every game in the college football season is critical, you end up with great stories like Appalachian State beating Michigan, which give great people like Jerry Moore a couple of weeks of celebrity that they otherwise wouldn't get. In a college playoff system, that game gets swept under the rug and people only talk about how Michigan's seeding will be affected.
• The quality of any playoff system would be infinitely corruptible. I point to the current state of Texas high school football. We now have two tiers of playoffs -- for big schools and small schools -- at the six-man level. We're talking about schools that have 10 people in their senior class being put in a higher tier than schools with eight people in their senior class. We've opened up the playoffs so much that schools that go 2-8 get into the postseason all the time. It makes no freakin' sense, other than giving people the ability to say they made it to the playoffs.
• People know that controversy is good for the game. I'll end with a bit from the Wall Street Journal, quoting the man who created the AP college football poll:

The point is that rankings were never about fairness or producing a clear-cut winner. They were about creating what fans need most: something to argue about. Before he died, the AP sports editor who created its famous poll, Alan Gould, explained it this way: "It was a case of thinking up ideas to develop interest and controversy between football Saturdays. . . . That's all I had in mind, something to keep the pot boiling. Sports then was living off controversy, opinion, whatever. This was just another exercise in hoopla."

From Facebook:

Here's the deal: Right now, we have a system that provides for a great, intense regular season and gives us plenty of post-season drama and great traditional bowl games. However, the argument is this system has to be destroyed because of this sense that we MUST have an undisputed national champion, and the ONLY WAY to do so is to have a playoff.

That makes the perfect the enemy of the good. First off, you suck away the interest from the regular season (I.E. basketball.) Second, it puts too much faith in the playoff process. Does the best overall team always win in a playoff? Of course not. It has far more to do with who's matched up with who -- basically, luck.

I think the system will eventually recognize a Utah, given time and continued success. And yeah, if I'm a guy from Tulane, I'm probably going to spend the rest of my life going on about "we could of been champs." But that's a lot better to say than, "Oh yeah, remember how Florida stomped us in the first round?" Which would be the final result, 99 out of 100 times.