LSU-Ohio State Showdown Will Settle BCS Mess, Or Will It?

Is there a bigger farce than college football's Bowl Championship Series?

Ohio State University and Louisiana State will play for college football's national title after finishing atop the final Bowl Championship Series standings, which were released yesterday. The BCS Championship Game is scheduled for Jan. 7 in New Orleans, the last of this season's 32 bowl games.

Ohio State (11-1) and LSU (11-2) climbed into the top two spots in the BCS after losses by Missouri and West Virginia, the seventh change in eight weeks of the rankings. Kansas, Oregon, Boston College and South Florida also were in the top two of the BCS earlier this season.

Critics have been unrelenting:

A USA Today editorial states the system "is the biggest joke in sports. The notion that a mixture of human polls and computer rankings could credibly define the two teams most deserving of playing in a championship game is absurd."

A headline in the Memphis Commercial Appeal reads: "Don't Look For Logic In BCS Pickings." That's where Geoff Calkins says it best:

"Listen, I'm not going to lose a lot of sleep over this country's system for picking a college football champion. Better we should fret about this country's system of providing health care, or teaching our children, or picking a president.

"But why not just come out and say what this annual sporting fiasco is really all about?

"The BCS schools want to keep all the big postseason money for themselves. So they can't have a true playoff system. Because, then, how could they exclude the little guys from the playoff system? They don't keep the little guys out of the NCAA basketball tournament."

And during ABC's coverage of the Oklahoma-Missouri Big 12 title game on Saturday, as Oklahoma pulled ahead of Missouri 28-17 and was driving for another score, the net's Kirk Herbstreit said, "If this game holds on, the BCS is gonna implode. This is their worst nightmare in the history of the ten years. This is as bad as it's ever gotten."

In the other BCS games: Southern California (10-2) plays Illinois (9-3) in the Rose Bowl, Hawaii (12-0) goes against Georgia (10-2) in the Sugar Bowl, Oklahoma (11-2) faces West Virginia (10-2) in the Fiesta Bowl and Virginia Tech (11-2) plays Kansas (11-1) in the Orange Bowl.

Ohio State received a grade of .959 out of 1.000 in the BCS standings, which are determined using the USA Today coaches' poll, the Harris Interactive poll and six computer rankings. LSU was second at .939, while Virginia Tech had a score of .870.

``It's been a crazy football season,'' Ohio State coach Jim Tressel said yesterday in a televised interview with Fox. ``There's a lot of good football teams and there will be two really good ones playing in this (championship) game.''

Certainly, that's easy to say when you are one of those two teams.

Ohio State and LSU were the most consistent of the championship game contenders, with the Buckeyes ranked No. 1 for the first four weeks of the BCS standings before losing to Illinois on Nov. 10. LSU replaced the Buckeyes atop the BCS for two weeks before losing in triple overtime for the second time this season.