Watch the honchos put some teeth into that before next season. With a little foresight, the BCS could have envisioned one of the conferences going downhill quickly as a real possibility and added the ability to kick out its champ. If that were in place this year, Louisville, the Conference USA champ ranked 10th in the BCS, would have been a pretty attractive substitute candidate.
Don't think that won't come up in the meetings. Louisville becomes a BCS team when it joins the Big East next season.
Cal, Texas, Boise State and Georgia are all teams in the top eight that might not get a BCS bid, and any of them would be good choices over Pittsburgh or Syracuse, not that anyone's going to be making the case for Boise State, a non-BCS team, at those Whack-a-Mole meetings.
The reason the honchos keep having to change the BCS system is that it was created to do two mutually exclusive things: determine an uncontroversial national champion and protect the lucrative bowl structure -- a structure that prevents the crowning of an uncontroversial champion. It's kind of like building a car that's meant to go forward and backward at the same time. You spend a lot of time heading back to the ol' drawing board.
I'm already looking forward to the 2006 Whack-a-Mole meetings, when the honchos put their heads together to solve whatever foreseeable problem pops up in 2005.
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December heroes stiffed by S.I. [PERMALINK]
Sports Illustrated announced Sunday that the Boston Red Sox are the magazine's Sportsmen of the Year. Evidently, year is defined as "not quite the first 11 months of the year," rendering any December heroes irrelevant.
SI.com lets fans vote online for the Sportsman of the Year, even though the vote, which is still going on, clearly has nothing to do with the selection. It's just that you have to let people vote online for everything. I had oatmeal for breakfast this morning because that's what readers decided in an online vote.
Actually the vote went: arsenic, cyanide, barbed wire, oatmeal, something I'd rather not mention. But fortunately I don't really listen to readers either.
What's really surprising is that the Red Sox aren't leading the online voting. SI.com doesn't list the results as most online polls do, but as of Monday morning, the leader was swimmer Michael Phelps, followed by cyclist Lance Armstrong and the late Pat Tillman.
I wouldn't have thought the Red Sox could lose an online poll. They'd win a Web election for Horse of the Year.
No offense to Phelps, but I suspect the poll results have more to do with poor Web-page design than anything else. I inadvertently voted for hockey player Jarome Iginla because the interface was so unclear.
And you know who wasn't even one of the 13 candidates for the S.I. award? Barry Bonds, who only had one of the best offensive seasons in baseball history. Emeka Okafor was a nominee, but not Bonds.
This column names a Sports Person of the Year. The third annual winner, following Serena Williams in 2002 and LeBron James in '03, will be announced -- I know this is crazy -- at the end of the year.
Previous column: NFL Week 12
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About the writer
King Kaufman is a senior writer for Salon. Visit his column archive.
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