Stewart Mandel, poster boy for what's wrong with the BCS

Well, okay, Mandel isn't THE problem with the BCS. But his latest musings at SI.com highlight one of the biggest issues.

In the article, Mandel offers up his preseason choice for a BCS National Championship showdown:

So, what potential 2010 matchup would elicit a similar curiosity factor? I'll go with Alabama vs. Boise State.

Everyone is entitled to his or her opinion, and a sports columnist's job is to have interesting opinions. So to that extent, all well and good.

The problem is that Mandel has a vote in the AP Top 25 poll.

Yes, it's true, the AP Poll is no longer officially counted in the BCS formula, but one of the polls that is counted, the sham Harris Poll, takes its cues from the AP the way the Eastern Bloc took its cues from Moscow. (Take a look at the voters for 2009--Don Strock? Craig Morton?!?) And even if you reject the AP influence on the Harris, you can't argue that Mandel, from his post at SI, is not enormously influential, and in a beauty contest--which is what the BCS is--influence counts. A lot.

In 2004, four teams, USC, Oklahoma, Auburn, and Utah went undefeated, but neither Auburn nor Utah made it to the championship game because they were not anointed preseason favorites.

Marvel if you will at Mandel's prelude to the matchup. You'd think it was Homer describing the Trojan War:

Once in a great while, there comes a game that transcends the four-hour window in which it is played. A game in which the meaning can't be fully comprehended until long after the final gun has sounded. A game that becomes part of its sport's collective lore, to be recollected and rehashed years after the dust has settled.

USC won 55-19. The game was over almost before it began.*

To be fair to Mandel, he had Auburn ranked first in his power rankings the week the Tigers were 10-0. After Auburn had close calls against Alabama and then Tennessee in the SEC Championship, he ranked them behind the Trojans and Sooners. But that's the problem; it's not that Mandel and others are right or wrong in their evaluations, it's that their evaluations actually count fro something.

If Mandel were writing about the NFL, his opinion would be just that. No matter which teams he and his other AP philosopher kings favored, the Super Bowl would be decided by results on the field.

Back to 2010: obviously if Boise State loses a game, it's probably out of the picture. Alabama would probably have to lose twice to no longer be in the mix. If either scenario occurred, we'd get a different matchup than the one Mandel was touting, and I have no doubt he'd vote accordingly. But if both teams keep winning, it will be very hard for an upstart team to crash the party--not because that team isn't as good or better, but because, unlike Alabama, Boise State, and a precious few others, it wasn't anointed in the preseason, before a single down has been played.

Football championships should not be chosen the same way figure skating champions are determined. In fact, figure skating judging, as corrupt as it is, is arguably less compromised than the BCS, since at least those judges have to watch every performance--unlike the AP and Harris voters, who depend on hearsay from the aforementioned Mandel and his compatriots at SI and (even more unethical) ESPN.

So you can know all you need to know about the college football season, folks, and before it's even begun. Take a look at top 5, maybe 10 teams in the preseason rankings. Barring something truly dramatic, they are the only teams with a chance to win it all, and it's all brought to you by the AP and Harris voters and all the other lovely people who put together the BCS. If you're looking for a real surprise, in which an upstart 69 Jets, or 99 Rams, or 02 Patriots, or 08 Giants defy the prognosticators and miraculously win a championship, look to the NFL, where the results are determined on the field, and not by a sports geek in his bathrobe.

*It should also be noted that both the USC and Oklahoma teams that year were later found guilty of committing NCAA infractions and were placed on probation, so they should never have been in the game in the first place.