• Joe Theismann was incredulous when he saw the matchup for the Bowl Championship Series title game.

  The newly inducted Hall of Famer knew there were problems with the BCS, but leaving the No. 1 team out of the title game was beyond belief.

  "I hope they realize how ridiculous it looks when USC is No. 1 and not playing for the national championship," Theismann said Tuesday.

  Well, sorry Joe, but fuck you. USC is #1 in the polls for two and only two reasons:

  1. They were previously #2 and #1 lost. There was no serious attempt among sportswriters and poll voters to determine if USC is really a better team than OU - it's just that undefeated OU lost and one-loss USC did not. It's the unwritten rule and has nothing to do with evaluating the teams, and everyone knows it - including Joe Theismann.
  2. USC was #2 because they're USC, and the sportswriters know that a big West Coast school led by a former NFL coach just has to be better than unheralded LSU. When teams look closely matched, they go with the big names, and they always have.

  What looks ridiculous is the #1 team being determined by arbitrary, unwritten rules, unrelated to field performance, and insisting that no other way can possibly be logical.

• I can't think of any other sport where the champion doesn't play the next best team in a playoff," said Hayden Fry, the former coach at Iowa, SMU and North Texas State. "We are the only sport that does not have it. The best way to do it would be to take the four winners of the bowls and have a playoff."

  Uh...how about NCAA basketball? The defending champion doesn't get an automatic berth in the tournament. The #1 team in either poll is sure to get a berth, but it's not a guarantee of the system. And this year's champions, Syracuse, didn't win their conference! Horrors! How dare the NCAA invite them to play for the national championship?

• Theismann and Fry both proposed a modified playoff system that would be used after the bowl games to determine an undisputed national champion on the field.

  The conferences that run the BCS are considering a similar plan beginning in 2006 — taking the top two teams after the bowls — but even that could cause controversy.

  "Then there would be a debate about who those teams are," Covert said. "If you have four bowl winners and only two teams go to the championship, you'll have an issue."

  Talk about reactionary bullshit. This proposal is designed for no other reason than to pit USC against the winner of the OU-LSU game this year. If two-loss Michigan wins the Rose Bowl, does anyone really think they deserve a shot against a one-loss team for the national title?

  And what about last year? Undefeated Ohio State and Miami met in the Fiesta Bowl for the national title, but under this asinine idea, Ohio State would have been forced to play one-loss Georgia, the winner of the Sugar Bowl and #3 in the BCS, for the title. This is nothing more than the typical BCS reactionary asshattery - demanding completely stupid changes because the title game isn't what the folks who follow the unwritten rules wanted.

Although I think Bob Stoops sometimes has a facade of stoicism on his public statements, what he said this week mirrors how I feel:

Stoops finds it amusing that people are disputing the Sooners' appearance in the Sugar Bowl just a few days after Oklahoma was being touted as one of most dominant college football teams ever.

"In the last four weeks, everyone wanted to tell us we were the greatest team in the history of college football," he said. "We didn't listen to that just like we're not going to listen to someone saying that maybe now we're not worthy."

And, by the way, all you USC fans have misplaced anger at Oklahoma. Oklahoma is a clear #1 in the BCS, even with the conference loss and without the quality-win points from defeating Texas. You're mad that LSU barely beat out USC in the rankings, not that Oklahoma is in the title game. This nonsense about "conference champions" and "late wins" is just another way of saying "USC's loss is better than Oklahoma's loss," and by any objective measurement, it's not.

What's ridiculous is how everyone agreed that the polls are arbitrary, but everyone hates the BCS when it doesn't produce the same results as the arbitrary polls.

And there's not going to be a playoff, dammit. Don't make me write a story on this. Get over it.