Who’s No. 1? Under flawed BCS, who knows for sure?
NEW ORLEANS — For as flawed an annual exercise as the Bowl Championship Series can be, it does have one thing working in its favor: that big old Southeastern Conference.
SEC dominance makes it that much easier for us skeptics to reliably call tonight’s Lsu-alabama rematch the national championship game, even if we won’t know that for sure until the game is over.
Don’t you love a championship game that might not really be a championship game?
We’ve had our share of practice getting used to it, having watched for 14 years as smiling BCS officials handed a crystal football to the head coach of a so-called national champion who, depending on the year, might have been the secondbest team in the country. No one knew for sure.
Then there’s this year. If undefeated LSU defeats Alabama for the second time in little more than two months, it’s the 2011 national champion. Done deal. Fait accompli. The Tigers would even be one of the surer BCS champions. To beat Alabama on the road and at home (almost), and to run through the brutal SEC schedule otherwise unscathed, is a feat worthy of serious football acclaim.
This is the most competitive and talented era in the history of college football. For LSU to dominate at this time in this way would be quite an industrialstrength statement, if it completes the job tonight.
But what if Alabama wins? That’s not an insignificant question, because the Crimson Tide certainly had their chances to win Game 1 back in early November, and surely could do it here.
If these three teams end with one loss — Alabama, LSU and Oklahoma State — the Cowboys have every right to join the other two in claiming a share of the mythical national title:
Alabama, because it would have defeated the top-ranked team in the final game of the 2011 season.
LSU, because it was the only team to go through the regular season undefeated.
Oklahoma State, because, like Alabama, it lost just once in the regular season and won its bowl game in overtime against the No. 4 team in all the major polls, Stanford.
So this is for the national championship if the Tigers win it, and maybe for the national championship if they don’t.
In many ways, we’re no better off with the BCS than we were before, when all we had, basically, was chaos. The rampant uncertainty that would come with an LSU loss is reminiscent of the 1970s and 1980s in college football, only without the BCS’S unwavering and ill-advised confidence that it absolutely knows it is giving us the national champion year in and year out, when all it really might be doing is making a big mistake.
This, of course, is why we love college football so much, for the arguing.
Alabama-lsu Part I was played on Nov. 5, which was the day the news of the Penn State scandal hit. So college football’s best day was also its worst.
LSU’S three field goals beat Alabama’s two that day. The 9-6 final score is an anomaly in this season of runaway offense, but that, too, says something positive about these two teams. They use their tremendous speed to play the game as it’s supposed to be played, on both sides of the ball. We hear a 9-6 score, in overtime no less, and somehow think that’s boring, which says a lot more about us than it does about LSU and Alabama. Those two teams gave us a much-needed reminder that it’s refreshing to see defense emphasized and rewarded.
I do have one request, though: Could we have a touchdown this time?