There is no sport I love more than college football. The possibility for fantastic finishes, unbelievable plays, epic matchups, and the annointing of new heroes can happen every weekend. Memorable moments like a referee tackling a player, a team scoring a winning touchdown with the band in the way who mistakingly thought the game was over, or a near impossible catch holding on to the ball while hugging the defensive player, and a high scoring too close to call Texas vs. USC national championship game are just some of the possibilities tuning into the game each week.

Most people that follow college football know, however, the complaints with the game. The BCS rankings are not calculated fairly, the computers have too much influence and miss aspects of the game humans could catch, an undefeated non BCS conference team should get the chance to play for the national title if all the other schools have a loss, the amount of time between the end of the regular season and the bowl games allows for the team to transform to a new one or makes the players lose the intensity they kept during the whole season, and on and on.

I have to give the NCAA credit for a few rule changes to problems that plagued the league for years. Finally, games no longer end in ties no matter what, forcing someone to win a close battle. Also, the instant replay backs up or refutes controversial calls and takes away the error of even trained eyes.  No longer can games be won on "phantom touchdowns" that if reviewed with cameras would have clearly been overturned.

But the elephant of the BCS has still been avoided. Not for lack of trying. They minimized the influence of the computers by allowing human voters to account for two thirds of the BCS rankings. That has not been good enough.

Which leads to the biggest problem in college football......

*The chance every year that a deserving team will be left out of the national championship game.*

It is not impossible for one team in every single BCS conference to go undefeated in a single year. Shoot, it is not even impossible for two teams in conferences without a conference championship game to go undefeated along with this in a single year. Throw in a non BCS team like a Notre Dame and the BCS mess would be too crazy to sort out.

Who do you put in the championship game? Do you put in an undefeated team from the SEC who trailed late in games with both quality opponents and below average teams yet pulled out the win every time? How about the ACC team that squashed all of its competition by an average of 40 points but never really had a game with an opponent in the top fifteen? Maybe the Big Twelve champions who won consistently against average opponents but never looked overpowering? What if it was simply too hard to tell?

Of course, the likelihood of this situation is incredibly low, but what if even four teams went undefeated in a single season, each as possible as the other to be the best team in the country?

This decision making process had to happen as recent as last year. A one loss Ohio State team was assumed to be in the national championship game, although it did not get the respect it had the previous year after getting crushed 41-14 by Florida for the championship.

Who to pick between two loss Georgia, two loss but SEC champion LSU, undefeated Hawaii, or two loss USC among a couple other possibilities to face Ohio State?

Logically, without knowing anything about college football, it would make sense to put undefeated Hawaii in the national championship game. But after rationalization, commentators and football analysts told us that it made sense for LSU, coming from the best conference in football, the SEC, and actually winning their conference championship deserved to go. Their only losses came in overtime anyways, they told us. LSU won the championship and Hawaii got destroyed on every possible level by Georgia, supposedly ending the debate about who was right and wrong. USC and Georgia still had their arguments to be in that game and would probably have their own 2008 BCS champion hardware in the trophy case had their arguments convinced the public.

But this illustrates what is wrong with the sport. If Hawaii had beaten Georgia convincingly it would have been hard to justify not giving them a share of the national championship. This could have been the second time in the decade long history of the BCS that the system had seriously messed up.

This brings me back to my point and I will run down a few quick reasons why this is the worst problem. So again....

*The chance every year that a deserving team will be left out of the national championship game.*

Here's my top 5 reasons why this is so bad.

1. This causes teams to be forced to try to win on "style points." Convincingly winning on national television against an esteemed opponent holds too much sway in the BCS. Alabama didn't just beat Georgia, it slammed Georgia to the mat and shot to the ceiling in an instant. At this writing, Texas Tech is an undefeated 8-0 in a conference that is stacked this year, yet somehow manages to not be in the top 5 and is behind three one loss teams mostly because they haven't had that win against an elite team (which would change if they happen to beat Texas next weekend).

2. Media analysts have too much influence on the human voters as to who the "best" team in football is. Think about it, remember a month and a half ago or so, this year's USC team was announced as maybe one of the greatest teams of all time. Check back with those same people now and they will tell you if they are honest how wrong they were, yet they certainly had most of the country convinced.

3. Conferences with a championship game receive more credit than the conferences or independent teams that do not. Memory is fleeting. Two years ago, even though we might have believed at the time that Ohio State and Michigan were still the two best teams in the country after an exciting high scoring game and USC losing their chance to be in the championship by choking against an inferior team, voters chose to give Florida a leap in the polls especially since their conference victory was much more vivid in the minds of the college football world.

4. The split national championship. Yes, it can still happen. No outright winner of the title. Only has happened once in ten years, but it still happened and is not pretty. This forces the BCS to say it screwed up and no one can be annointed the true champion, cheapening the honor. I am unsure whether they would still award a share of the championship to the team they wronged or if they would just say "sorry, our mistake" now, but I am inclined to think they would still award a split championship.

5. The need to engage in politics. See Les Miles and Pete Carroll for perfect examples of this. Both coaches, when necessary, have felt compelled to convince the press that their team is the biggest force to be reckoned with. Nothing wrong with that, but shouldn't the season and record clearly tell us if it is true? Fact is politcking works.

Solutions are tough, but until this is figured out the BCS is going to have to pray every year that they get lucky. They are begging for just one of either Penn State, Texas, or Alabama to lose just once, so they can avoid dealing with the flaws of the system deciding the yearly champion of NCAA college football.