Jovenitti: BCS system gives small schools no hope

Poor Boise State. Poor Utah and poor TCU. Can they ever catch a break?

No. 3 Boise State… Poor Boise State. Poor Utah and poor TCU. Can they ever catch a break?

No. 3 Boise State finally defeats a Top-10 team in the regular season, and said “Top-10” team goes and loses to an FCS team the next week. No. 4 TCU tries to schedule tough opponents, but its biggest non-conference game this year was its win against No. 24 Oregon State. Meanwhile, No. 14 Utah actually does have a challenging schedule, but apparently the voters don’t care.

The experts were saying that this could be the year that a non-BCS school — or a team outside of the “big six” conferences — could be selected to play in the BCS National Championship Game. But it’s only the second week of the season, and it looks like these BCS-busters are out of luck, even though they all remain undefeated.

This week, I give you 10 reasons why BCS-busters will never make the National Championship Game.

10. Allowing a BCS-buster in the title game would reaffirm that the BCS is flawed to begin with. The BCS sucks. Everybody knows that. Even the BCS itself knows it sucks. But it makes money, so its participants don’t care. If it allows a school like Boise State into the title game, the BCS would be admitting that its formula — only giving automatic bids to certain conferences — is flawed. The BCS would never do that, no matter how good a Mountain West or Western Athletic Conference team is.

9. Underdogs are nice, but one winning a championship is reserved for Hollywood. Everyone loves seeing David take down Goliath, but when has that ever happened in a National Championship? Never. Butler came close to doing it in the NCAA Tournament last year, but it lost to the epitome of a goliath: Duke. And that was in basketball, which actually gives each team a fair shot at the championship.

8. Playing each other won’t help. Utah and TCU have to play each other every year. One of them will always have to lose. And last year, the BCS made undefeated TCU play undefeated Boise State in the Fiesta Bowl, which some people jokingly called “The Kids’ Table Bowl.” Not many people watched that game. Nobody wants to see David vs. David.

7. Even when a school has a tougher schedule, the polls conveniently ignore it. Boise State and TCU started the season in the Top 10, which is important if a team wants to make it to the National Championship. But the BCS-buster with the toughest schedule — Utah — started out at No. 24. The Utes already beat then-No. 15 Pitt. Later in the season, they’ll host TCU and go to Notre Dame.

That schedule isn’t much easier than a typical Big East or ACC schedule. There is no reason that an undefeated Utah team shouldn’t make the title game, but it might have started the season ranked too low to do so.

6. The ranked teams that they beat often don’t help. I think that Virginia Tech was so mad at Boise State for beating it in the first game that it threw away its entire season to get back at the Broncos. The victory over the Hokies was supposed to be the signature win that Boise State needed to ride into the Championship. But Virginia Tech ended up losing to FCS school James Madison on Saturday — making Boise State’s schedule appear even weaker.

5. The Senate doesn’t care. During the 2008-09 season, Utah Senator Orrin Hatch urged the government to investigate the BCS for violating antitrust laws by excluding schools like undefeated Utah from the BCS National Championship Game, but allowing one-loss Oklahoma and one-loss Florida to play.

However, I’m pretty sure the Senate has more pressing issues to consider — after all, they have steroids in baseball to worry about.

4. Nobody has the balls to schedule them. Opponents of these BCS-buster schools frequently point to their weak schedules. The busters often try to schedule tougher non-conference opponents, but nobody will agree to play them.

Pitt was the only BCS school to agree to a home-and-home with Utah. And honestly, it’s not in the best interest of top-tier teams to schedule BCS-busters. Their conference slates are tough enough, so why schedule a potential loss when they could just beat up on Coastal Carolina? That’d be a lot of risk for a small reward.

3. Utah went and ruined everything by joining the Pac-10. When Boise State announced that it would be leaving the WAC to join the Mountain West Conference this summer, it looked like the Mountain West could finally earn that automatic BCS bid and probably a National Championship Game invitation. With Boise State, Utah and TCU in the same conference, the Mountain West could have competed with the Big East and the ACC, since both of those leagues typically only have two or three ranked teams per year.

But then Utah accepted an invitation to the Pac-10, crushing any chances of the Mountain West ever getting an automatic bid. And now Hatch’s argument doesn’t matter, because Utah will be in National Championship contention when it becomes a Pac-10 member.

2. SEC fans would be ticked. The BCS gets a ton of money from the SEC. When the SEC is in a BCS bowl, the fans fill the stadium — most likely because they don’t have very far to travel — and the television ratings are through the roof. The SEC has won all four BCS National Championship games it’s been in recently, and its fans often tout that it is the toughest league in the country.

If Boise State or TCU made the title game over a one-loss Alabama, SEC fans would be raging. And the BCS doesn’t want to anger its biggest moneymakers.

1. What would we have left to argue about? If the BCS were fair, or even if it adopted a —­ gasp! —­ playoff system, what would college football fans argue about? Which team is better? Pshh, my team is clearly better than yours, and that’s the way it will always be. Let’s argue about the BCS instead.