SUN EDITORIAL:

Crowning a true champion

Major college football should adopt playoff system out of sense of fairness

Saturday, July 4, 2009 | 2:04 a.m.

It won’t be long before American sports fans enjoy the kickoff of the 2009 college football season and begin debates over the best teams and conferences in the country.

As the regular season winds down each November and the better teams get invited to participate in financially lucrative bowl games, one question inevitably arises: Which two teams deserve to play in the national championship game?

In other team sports, both at the professional and collegiate levels, a playoff system determines the finalists. Not so in major college football, which instead has what is known as the Bowl Championship Series, or BCS.

The BCS selects its two championship participants by relying on a Byzantine mixture of polls and computer rankings that appears as complex as the formula for an atomic bomb. The result is that other seemingly worthy teams are unfairly left on the sidelines, relegated to lesser bowl games.

A perfect example occurred last year when the undefeated University of Utah, which competes with UNLV in the Mountain West Conference, was shut out of the national championship game. Instead, the two participants, the Universities of Florida and Oklahoma, each entered the game with one loss. Utah had to settle for a 31-17 victory against the University of Alabama in the Sugar Bowl to complete its perfect season.

Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, understandably is upset with the way the BCS system works. He has called for a congressional hearing to determine whether college football may be violating antitrust laws by restricting competition. But we think Congress has far more serious issues to deal with.

That said, there is no question that major college football should switch to a playoff format that would be fairer than the current system while doing a better job of crowning a true champion. Until that happens, we will be left wondering whether the winner of the championship game is truly the best team in college football.