Wow, King. Thanks for taking an interest in the College football season now that the Big Ten season is in it's final week. I admire your ability to cut through all this nonsense of offense vs. defense, rivalries, histories, etc., and get to the really important issue: BCS Bashing. Sigh.

The good news for the rest of us is that we now have a final four: Michigan, OSU, USC, and Notre Dame who will be playing a quasi-playoff starting next Saturday.

My only question is: who's Buster gonna flip for?

Go Bucks!

King, you say that "the one thing the stupid BCS does well...is make every regular-season game vitally important", except that your column suggests that it doesn't even do that. If a September loss is better than a November loss, then the games in September aren't as important as the games in November. That would make those games less vital.

The simple truth is that every year we get this debate for one reason or another, except for those rare seasons when you have two (and only two) undefeated teams from major conferences (and not counting the Big East as a Major Conference, for some reason, unless your school's name is West Virginia).

But really, what blows my mind is that the NCAA could make more money with a playoff system. Since that seems to be the primary motivational factor in most collegiate sports, I'm confused as to why they insist on the BCS system. I mean, screw the schools, there's cash to be made!

King,

What I find perplexing about the whole SF Olympic bid failure is that if publicly financed stadiums are a bad investment for taxpayers, then the Olympics are the Titanic of publicly funded sporting events. Hosting the Olympic Games is almost always a huge money loser for the host city (the last Olympics to end up in the black was L.A. 84, I believe) even if local merchants derive some benefit from the madding crowd. So why would San Fran, which has had the good sense to just say no to publicly financed stadiums get all excited about throwing money down the sinkhole known as the Olympics? I suspect that Newsome and the City Council know that they dodged a bullet, and the whining is for the benefit of whatever local constituency wanted the games in the first place. Or else they just lost their minds.

Riding BART during the games would have been good fun though...

"I think it's not a majority opinion, but there are people out there who believe that because Ohio State and Michigan are clearly the best teams in the country, neither should be denied a place in the title game just for losing to the other. By definition, Saturday's loser would have the toughest loss of any one-loss team."

One example where that could be wrong.... Michigan beats Ohio State and Wisconsin wins their last game.... Ohio State and Wisconsin would have one loss apiece, both to the same team, so, by definition, Wisconsin's one loss would be just as tough as Ohio State's one loss.

Granted there are two teams with no losses, Rutgers and Boise State, and the fact that neither will even get a chance to compete for the national championship is the biggest travesty of the whole system.

King, I hate to say it, but you're wrong on this one.

The argument in support of conferences isn't that they should serve as some sort of league division, as in pro sports, but rather to regionalize play during the season. Now, I'll agree that this has been twisted a bit, but it is still mostly effective in that regard. Why is this important? Well, in most cases it cuts down on travel time for student-athletes. Arguably this means more time for class and studying. (Yes I know that's utter bullshit, but let's at least try to remain internally consistent for the moment. Plus, there are a lot of non-players that make these road trips, and they DO have to keep up with their studies.) So conferences generally are good, and not for the reason you posit.

As an example, look at college basketball. The major conferences regularly place 5 or more teams in the tournament. It's by no means impossible or even unlikely -- on paper -- for teams from the same conference to meet in the championship game.

Now, a real college football playoff system is unlikely to exist anytime in the near future. So we're stuck with the BCS or some version of it. And if we have to have this system of picking the two best teams in the nation to play in the championship game, then we certainly shouldn't have an arbitrary rule based on your argument serving as a bar to that happening. And we shouldn't pretend that the BCS is "kind of a playoff."

This year, at this point, you can argue that Michigan and OSU are not the two best teams. You could make that argument, but you'd be wrong. Unless this weekend's game is a blowout one way or the other, both teams will still be the two best in the nation.

If having two Big Ten teams in the national championship game hurts ratings, honks off fans of the PAC 10, SEC or worshipers at the church of the Golden Dome, tough beans.

So the principle of preventing a non-conference-winning team from playing in the championship game is more important than having the two best teams playing there? Why? What's so important about the conferences, which are based mostly on irrelevant geography anyway? You say it's the same reason that two teams from the A.L. can't meet in the World Series, or two teams for the East can't meet in the NBA Championship Series, etc., but what reason is that? You ask why have conferences at all if they're not going to affect who plays for a championship--well, why, indeed? If you can't provide an answer to that question, than to insist on the importance of those conferences to the championship--even when it prevents the two best teams from playing each other--is nothing but mindless bureaucracy.