Columnist Dean Juipe: Lack of true title game defies logic

Dean Juipe

Tuesday, Jan. 2, 2001 | 9:30 a.m.

Dean Juipe's column appears Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. His boxing notebook appears Thursday. Reach him at juipe@lasvegassun.com or 259-4084.

Three times in the 1990s the college football season ended without a clear and distinct national champion.

In each case -- in 1990, 1991 and 1997 -- the top-rated team in the final coaches' poll was not the top-rated team in the final writers' poll. The result: A sense of unfulfillment for the sport's millions of fans.

The same thing could happen again this year if the outcomes of the remaining two bowl games to be played -- tonight's Sugar Bowl between Florida and Miami and Wednesday's Orange Bowl between Oklahoma and Florida State -- end as the oddsmakers in Las Vegas predict they will. If Miami (a minus-6 favorite) and Florida State (a minus-12 favorite) both win, chances are each will be voted No. 1 in one poll and No. 2 in the other.

Has there ever been a greater misnomer than the Bowl Championship Series?

Initiated three years ago to reduce the likelihood of split champions, the BCS routinely runs the risk of failing at its primary mission. Its reliance on computers to determine which teams are selected to play in the season's final game asks a great deal of programmers who may not be the least bit football savvy.

The BCS's primary fault is that there is no Series at all. And that undermines precisely what the fans have requested for decades: A series of games in a playoff format that would lead to the two most deserving teams meeting with the national title on the line.

They do it in Division I-AA, Division II and Division III, as Georgia Southern, Delta State and Mount Union have already won those national championships for the 2000 season. But in Division I, where there is far and away the greatest focus and national interest, a playoff system remains but a dream.

It will be this way until at least 2006, as the current BCS agreement is locked into place through the 2005 season.

It's difficult to understand the administrators' reluctance to push for Division-I playoffs, as they readily admit there's a gold mine waiting to be exploited. "Without question, a playoff would be much more lucrative, with revenue estimates from double to triple that currently being generated," BCS coordinator John D. Swofford told USA Today.

Given the undeniable fact the fans want a playoff system -- one that would be implemented using the current bowls -- and that it would lead to an annual financial windfall, it simply doesn't add up that one isn't already in place.

Division-I college football is the only sport played, perhaps in the world, that does not automatically crown a single champion at the end of its season.

Where the BCS stumbled this season was in not matching Oklahoma and Miami in the final game. Instead, it advanced Florida State to the Orange Bowl with Oklahoma in spite of the fact Miami defeated FSU 27-24 back on Oct. 7.

On the strength of that victory, logic should have dictated that Miami had earned the right to play No. 1 Oklahoma. Yet the computer overlooked the FSU-Miami score and slotted the Seminoles into the big game.

The computer erred and those charged with guiding the sport continue to err. The best any of us can hope for is that they come to their senses by 2006.