There were those who had argued that Michigan deserved to go to that game, which will be played in the same Phoenix-area stadium that hosted the Fiesta Bowl next Monday, because the Wolverines looked like the second-best team in the nation after losing to No. 1 Ohio State 42-39 on the road in November.
Any argument that USC deserved a shot at the national title was blown up when the Trojans lost their regular-season finale to UCLA. You can't lose your last regular-season game and still go to the Championship Game, except under very specific circumstances spelled out on Pages 347-966, inclusive, of the top-secret BCS rule book, "Making It Up as We Go Along."
So Michigan, the team a lot of people thought was the clear No. 2 and should have been in the title game, got smoked by USC, a team that clearly had no business in the title game. So much for the argument that Michigan should have played for the championship.
And Boise State beat Oklahoma, a legitimate BCS team, owner of only one legitimate loss, and even with that other one, the result of a hideously blown call, still ranked ahead of Boise State in every poll except the BCS.
But Boise State plays in the Western Athletic Conference and racked up its undefeated record against the likes of Sacramento State and Louisiana Tech, so it has no business in the title game because it would get blown away against such clearly superior competition, and please ignore the Fiesta Bowl.
And Florida gets to play Ohio State for the championship, thanks to its own fine season but really thanks to the efforts of UCLA.
UCLA went 7-6 and had more of a say in who plays for the championship than Boise State, which went 13-0. That makes sense, in a cheerleader turns into a flying lizard sort of way.
Gosh, if there were only some way to get all these teams together in a contest of some kind, to sort out all the teams with plausible claims to playing for the title. Ohio State and Florida, sure, but also USC and Michigan, and Boise State. And let's not forget Oklahoma, and the four teams playing in the exhibition games Tuesday and Wednesday nights, Louisville, Wake Forest, Notre Dame and LSU -- mostly because we'd need an even number of teams. Forgetting any three of those last five would be OK by me.
Boise State and its fans will always have Glendale. They'll always have that incredible game, where it may have taken a hook and ladder and a Statue of Liberty play and a wide receiver pass and two cheerleaders turning into aerial reptiles, but the Broncos showed they can play with the big-conference powers.
They'll always have a night on which quarterback Jared Zabransky could sit in the postgame press conference and call the win the greatest college football game in history and not get laughed off the dais.
Too bad it was all just a scrimmage, about as meaningful as that humdinger of a spring training game I once watched not far from the site of Boise State's triumph.
Hey! I just had an idea. Maybe there should be a tournament with the top, oh, eight teams. The championship could then be decided on the field, and I don't mean on a field 3,000 miles away by a team with six losses. And crazy upsets like Boise State's could become an annual national obsession, kind of like in basketball, where that sort of thing happens. Oh, folks, this is a terrific idea!
I'm not the only one seeing this, right?
Previous column: The Year in Sports
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About the writer
King Kaufman is a senior writer for Salon. Visit his column archive. You can e-mail him at king at salon dot com or visit his MySpace page.
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