Talking college football? BCS knows what it's doing

I think I have finally figured out these BCS bozos.

It took awhile, but I'm onto them. They may have fooled some of the people all of the time, but not me this time.

Because I know why they're doing what they do.

They're doing it on purpose.

The commissioners of the major conferences have come up with more ways to get deeper into the crevasses of the mind of the typical college football fan than Lee Corso on his worst day.

They keep giving us bad answers to good questions. They keep giving us the impression that they can't grasp the best scenario for college football even when they know what the best scenario is.

They continually try to find a way to rationalize that 1 and 1 equals 3. Their problem has no viable solution, but they keep coming up with them anyway.

It's all a plot, I tell you. Because look what they've done. We're talking college football at the end of April. There are no spring practices. Coaches are either on vacation or touring their booster clubs. The Heisman Watch list is months away. Nobody is going through withdrawal because it has been awhile and we've had this little thing called college basketball to keep us occupied.

Oh yeah, and The Masters and the start of Major League Baseball and steroid hearings and the NBA playoffs.

But these brilliant minds have got us talking football. I have sipped from the Kool-Aid barrel. This is the second column in two days on college football. In April. I'm sick.

They've sucked me in. How about you? Did you lean over to a friend today to talk about the latest developments in the BCS?

Gotcha.

The Boys of the BCS are eating room service in Phoenix doodling on hotel room notepads about what evil plot they can hatch next that will confuse us, anger us and get us going again.

Must be it. Nobody with a sense of sense could come up with all of the permutations of the past seven years.

Now the latest - a panel of voters may help decide which teams will play in the national title game, a game that will be played in the Fiesta Bowl a week after the New Year's Day bowls which will include another game in the same stadium that nobody will care about.

They're really giggling now. Somebody test these guys.

The real issue here is this panel that the BCS is considering. There are different possibilities - former athletic directors, former coaches, former journalists who are now on TV, maybe even a rogue sportswriter or two. The writers have already expressed their objections to helping define the news (even though it happens every day) and have pulled The Associated Press poll out of the BCS mix. There will still be an AP poll, but it will count for nothing which makes it about as significant as the Music City Bowl.

Now comes the really funny part. The BCS may end up being a combination of:

1. Coaches who don't really vote, instead letting their sports information directors do the dirty work of selecting Nos. 2-to-25 unless they have an agenda that week and want to drop or bump up a team. These coaches, by the way, don't want anyone to know their votes so they won't be exposed as being paranoid.

2. A combination of computer polls, none of which makes sense to anybody. Apparently, when you add all of these negatives together, it creates a positive, at least in the BCS world.

3. A panel of people who know the game, watch college football and are willing to endure the e-mails, threats and questions about their bloodlines that will come with voting publicly (Kevlar suits not required). Some of the names that have been floated as possibilities - Terry Bowden, Bobcat Golthwait and Karl Childers from Sling Blade.

Oh, what a championship it will be.

Except that it's not about crowning a college football king. We all know that no matter the formula, there is a better than average chance that there will be controversy in the end. We all know a playoff would be better. We all know that the 12th game would be unnecessary if they had a playoff because the money would be obscene.

But we wouldn't be talking about it in April.

You can reach sports columnist Pat Dooley at dooleyp@ gvillesun.com or 374-5053. You can hear The Pat Dooley Hour each weekday from 11 a.m. to noon on The Star 99.5-FM.