Columnist Ron Kantowski: BCS is more baffling than Britney

Tuesday, Dec. 11, 2001 | 10:22 a.m.

Ron Kantowski's column usually appears Thursday. Reach him at ron@lasvegassun.com or 259-4088. Regular sports columnist Dean Juipe has the day off.

Lemmee see if I have this straight: Nebraska, a team that couldn't even win its division or qualify for its conference championship game and got blown out in its last regular-season outing, gets to play for the national title because TCU beat Southern Miss in a meaningless game played last Friday night?

As far as making absolutely no sense, I've got to rank this development right up there with Britney Spears' success and the NFL's divisional alignments.

This past weekend's chain of events in college football has me scratching my head, if not my bare midriff. As surely as Pete Rozelle believed Atlanta was in the West, the Bowl Championship Series has somehow given us a national championship game featuring the must-be-living-right Nebraska Cornhuskers.

When the BCS computers were through crunching the numbers (actually, folding, spindling and mutilating the numbers is more like it), this is what it came down to: In that Nebraska had the "foresight" to be invited to play TCU in one of this year's preseason "classics," and managed to beat the vaunted Horned Frogs 19-0, it was able to benefit from TCU's 14-12 victory over Southern Miss in a makeup game on Friday.

The Frogs' win apparently pushed Nebraska ahead of Colorado, to which it lost 62-38 the day after Thanksgiving, in strength of schedule by a margin roughly equivalent to Ralphie the Buffalo's I.Q., and into the Rose Bowl against unbeaten Miami.

Too bad for Colorado fans that the Buffs didn't play Hawaii this year. In that the Warriors were one of the only other teams in action Saturday and beat previously undefeated Brigham Young, that probably would have been enough for Colorado to receive the title game nod ahead of Nebraska.

You've heard the rant about "controlling our own destiny?" That doesn't apply in college football these days.

The BCS' worst nightmare become reality over the weekend when No. 2 Tennessee couldn't take care of business in the SEC title game and lost to a marginal LSU team. This a week after previous No. 2 Florida couldn't take care of business by beating Tennessee at home in another makeup game.

With apologies to David Humm, Nebraska's former All-American QB from Las Vegas, and anybody from North Platte who may be reading on the Internet, now I'm almost forced to root for the undeserving Huskers (something I would never do normally, unless Nebraska scheduled Taliban Tech) in the so-called title game. A Nebraska win on Jan. 3 almost assuredly will result in a split national championship -- the very scenario that the BCS was concocted to prevent.

The sports writers who vote in the Associated Poll are so upset by this BCS B.S. that you would have thought somebody reduced the fat content in the press box pregame meal. The scribes are bound and determined to anoint the Fiesta Bowl winner, either No. 2 Oregon or No. 3 Colorado, as their champ, if for no other reason than to show that the BCS folks are not playing with a fully inflated pigskin.

Forget what I said about Britney Spears. It can now be said that the BCS is more bogus than Milli Vanilli.