Though letters appear newest first, this response was written while reading bottom to top, so it goes oldest first.

The NCAA doesn't care who its "champion" is as long as people keep talking about college football, getting excited about college football, and (this is the important one) spending lots of money on college football.

and

I'm not about to deny that the NCAA loves money and is fundamentally corrupt. But there has to be more to the continued existence of the damn BCS structure than the NCAA's greed.

The BCS isn't an NCAA deal per se. It's a cartel of the six major conferences, designed to maximize their profits, and the hell with the rest of the schools. They had to kick down a few bucks to the smaller conferences last year to avoid the threat of antitrust litigation. The polls were designed to keep people talking about college football, which they already were doing before BCS.

The NCAA has resisted a football playoff because of the existing bowl system, which would be compromised or ruined by it, which would alienate a lot of sponsors and other moneyed interests -- including the BCS. The BCS cartel filled a vacuum created by the NCAA's lack of leadership.

Of course, whenever you accuse the NCAA of anything, the NCAA says, "There's no such thing as the NCAA in the way you're thinking of it. The NCAA is incapable of 'wanting' anything. It's just an association of member schools. The schools decide everything."

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I would be very interested to see the ratings on Fox compared to NBC or whoever had it [the World Series] last.

They're much lower on Fox, but it's not a fair comparison. All broadcast ratings are lower than they used to be because of the advent of cable and satellite. But you could study the ratings performance of the World Series vs. some average or standard for the time. Say, NBC's 1990 World Series ratings vs. the average network prime time rating for that year, and the same measure for Fox now. I don't know how that would compare, or even if that would be a meaningful measure.

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I think technically you could put Joe Theisman in 11th place behind Ron Jaworski because his winning percentage is actually .56383 because he's so graciously recused himself from picking on games where he's announcing.

Actually, I erred putting Theissman 14th ahead of Eric Allen. They should be tied for 14th because they both have 53 wins. The Panel o' Experts contest is based solely on wins, correct picks. You can't win it by refusing to pick certain games and having a higher winning percentage. A non-pick is the same as a loss. Maybe it'd be less confusing if I just listed unpicked games as losses. (Peter King has one unpicked game too, last Friday's hurricane-rescheduled Chiefs-Dolphins game, which he didn't publicly pick.)

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I am disappointd that Kaufman, whose intellect shines through most of his columns, ignores the trite but true chestnut "garbage in-garbage out" when he says that "the computers don't base their rankings on assumptions the way human polls do...what computers do is analyze the action that's taken place on the field". He then accepts that the computers' assessments of strength of schedule are compelling in placing Texas above USC.

Whoa! I didn't accept anything. I didn't express an opinion about whether Texas is better than USC. I don't know or, frankly, care.

I wrote, "theoretically at least, what computers do is analyze the action that's taken place on the field." Of course they analyze it based on assumptions made by programmers who may be right or wrong. That's what I meant by "You can criticize the computer rankings' methodology all you want if you can figure them out, which would put you ahead of me," the first part of that sentence. As writer Michael David Smith, an e-mail pal, points out, one of the worst things about the BCS computer rankings is that they're proprietary, so they could be based on "garbage in," and/or they could be spitting out rankings based on human errors in data input, and nobody will ever know because we can't see the work.

But anyway, the point I was trying to make: The computers are analyzing the play on the field. They may be analyzing it badly, and that may be based on human assumptions. But they're not going, "That team doesn't look too good, but it's USC!"

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Trust me, the ratings for a World Series in Chicago would be HUGE even if every game started precisely at midnight...if the Cubs were playing!

Good point. The games started at precisely the same time last year, when the ratings were good, so late start times are not the immediate cause of poor ratings.

And just why is it that there are NO daytime league championship or Series games anymore -- even on weekends?

Because the ratings, demographics and advertising rates are better in prime time.