Arkansas Sports 360 - ArkansasSports360.com

1/11/2012 at 2:32pm

The right team is the college football national champion today. But nothing that happened during the course of the season brought us fairly to that conclusion — not in the way college football has crowned its champion over the past 75 years.

Alabama didn't play its best game, especially in kicking field goals, and lost at home to LSU on Nov. 5, yet the Crimson Tide was given another shot. Alabama took full advantage with a complete dominance of LSU in the BCS Championship Game in New Orleans.

Oklahoma State, like Alabama, lost one regular-season game — one of the biggest upsets of the season, in fact, in an overtime road loss to mediocre Iowa State on the same day the OSU athletic family learned that its women's head basketball coach and chief assistant had been killed in a plane crash the day before in a remote area 45 minutes west of Little Rock. To think that this tragic event didn't have something to do with Oklahoma State's players' minds being unfocused on the Cyclone that Friday night is to think every college football player is a robot with no emotion.

Oklahoma State didn't play an SEC team, didn't face one in a bowl game as well. We'll never know if the Cowboys' high-octane offense could have scored 21 or more points against Alabama or LSU, but we should have had the chance to know.

The "plus-one" format for determining a national champion — Southeastern Conference commissioner Mike Slive's favored plan — that would pair four teams in two semifinal bowl games and the winners meeting in the championship matchup, should be adopted immediately.

Don't wait for 2014 when the current BCS contract is revised — do it now.

Had the system been in place for this year's bowl season, we likely would have had semifinal pairings of LSU vs. Stanford (or a rematch with Oregon, which defeated Stanford by 23 points) and Alabama vs. Oklahoma State. Yes, we believe LSU and Alabama would have taken care of business and met in the title game, and Alabama showed Monday night it was clearly the more talented and more disciplined team.

And, just as many pundits around the country were theorizing that Les Miles had "outcoached" Nick Saban in the last two regular season meetings between the SEC powerhouses, on Monday Saban and his staff looked like an NFL crew in total preparation of every facet while Miles and his coaches appeared to have taken the past 30 days off.

This will happen when the regular season ends on Dec. 3 and the two teams in the title game don't play again until Jan. 9. As Lou Holtz, who enjoyed the role of the underdog in coaching Arkansas to a momumentus upset of Oklahoma in the 1978 Orange Bowl, kept saying Monday night, a game like this always favors the hunter over the hunted.

LSU didn't look as much like the overconfident hunted as it resembled some of the recent wide-eyed Arkansas teams that have gone into Tuscaloosa and been trounced by the Tide.

Imagine, though, how the game might have gone if it were part of a mini-playoff, a four-team event. No longer would Nick Saban have had more than a month to prepare for LSU's expected use of the option. The Crimson Tide would have first have had to deal with a type of attack, and talent, it didn't see all season — that of Oklahoma State's offense with quarterback Brandon Weeden and receiver Justin Blackmon. Then, with a win, the Tide would have had the usual week to get ready for LSU again.

The proponents of the current system that involves both the bowls and the BCS say they don't want the regular season diminished by a playoff, even the "plus-one" variety, and yet we saw the BCS overlook the regular season in determining the final two teams. LSU won its regular season game with Alabama; that should have been enough in the theory that every week "is a playoff," in the vernacular of such TV voices as ESPN's Kirk Herbstreit.

Oklahoma State stubbed its toe once on a Friday night in Ames, Iowa, and Stanford got run off its own field by Oregon (who had lost the season opener to a well-prepared LSU) and suddenly a rematch between the Tide and Tigers was in order. Remember, though, that the call by some for a rematch was already on the moment LSU kicked the winning field goal in overtime in Tuscaloosa.

Nick Saban defended the pairing a month ago, saying, "Lots of sports have rematches."

Yes, and every division and every sport in the NCAA except the top level of college football have playoffs, too. Alabama didn't win its league division, much less the SEC — yet that's also not to say that Alabama wasn't the most talented team in the country, as many viewed them. What it does say is that our standard method of deciding who is No. 1 in college football took an unprecedented turn in 2011.

It also sets up future decisions where a popularity contest will still fill one or both of the BCS Championship Game spots if something isn't done soon to change the system. Imagine where Arkansas or the likes of any Big 12 school other than Oklahoma or Texas would fall if the choice came down to the Hogs, or perhaps Kansas State, and one of college football's anointed powers (i.e. Ohio State, Southern Cal) for one of the BCS title game spots — all records being equal?

The distance of only about six inches, when Oklahoma State's possible winning field goal in regulation at Iowa State went over (instead of inside) the right upright was all that separated Alabama from being knocked out of this second chance to show the college football world that it was supreme.

A "plus-one" format would have assured it. Also, college football fans would have gotten three games, instead of one, that really mattered in the bowl season.

All the other bowls can continue to exist and charge teams to play in them, and the BCS or the NCAA or some new governing body of the schools can decide which top-tier bowls to include in the "plus-one," and how the games will rotate among the favored locales. Just make sure Dallas is part of it.

In recent days we heard yet another worry uttered by a BCS official, though, who claimed that creating a four-team playoff would simply lead to an eight-team tournament and further hurt the current bowl setup. (And, in case you need reminding, the current bowl setup only seems to serve the bowl operators, who as we've learned like to live the high life of lavish dinners and golf junkets, similar to a Congressional lobbyist.)

Let's just get the reasonable method for determining a national championship in place first, then worry about what might follow.

All that said, thanks to some luck (and tragic timing) in Ames, Iowa, we found that Alabama was the best team in college football in 2011. Most folks in the Arkansas traveling party to Tuscaloosa knew that back in late September.

And meanwhile, I would suspect some aging Ole Miss Rebels would like to have that 1959 national championship retroactively award to them. Those Rebels lost a heart-breaker on the famous 89-yard punt return by LSU's Billy Cannon on Halloween night, their only loss of the season, only to come back and thoroughly stomp the defending national champion Tigers 21-0 in the Sugar Bowl on Jan. 1, 1960. History repeats.

Award-winning columnist Jim Harris wasn’t around when Hugo Bezdek named the Razorbacks, it only seems that way. His acumen for UA football history is renowned and he has covered the Hogs and the state sports scene since 1976. He knows his way around music and food, too. Email: jharris@abpg.com, and follow Jim on Twitter @jimharris360

Tagged: Allstate Sugar Bowl, Ole Miss Rebels, Southeastern Conference, Stanford Cardinal, Oklahoma State Cowboys, LSU Tigers, BCS National Championship, Alabama Crimson Tide