Sometimes college football has an Alice in Wonderland quality. It will have that on Jan. 4 in the Sugar Bowl, when the national championship will be decided in a titanic showdown between the second-ranked team in the country and the . . . third-ranked team in the country.
Where will the top-ranked team be? In Pasadena, playing in the Rose Bowl New Year’s Day against the No. 4 team.
Southern California holds the top spot in the USA Today/ESPN coaches poll and the Associated Press poll of sportswriters. But the teams in the national championship game are selected by a computer. And the computer picked Louisiana State and Oklahoma, ranked second and third in both polls, to play for the championship.
The computer did so despite the shock of seeing supposedly invincible Oklahoma get undressed 35-7 Saturday night by Kansas State in the Big 12 title game.
This has some sports fans and commentators wailing about the terrible injustice of it all.
This is what sports fans and commentators do best. For years, before the computer stepped in, they wailed about the injustice of the rankings done by coaches and sportswriters. Some coaches supposedly took out grudges against rival coaches by voting them far down in the poll. Some sportswriters voted for teams they had never even seen play a down.
So why assume the computer is wrong?
It operates on a carefully crafted formula involving win-loss record, computer rankings, strength of schedule and victories over Top 10 opponents. By the computer’s reckoning, Oklahoma is still the best team, having played the fifth-toughest schedule in the country and suffering its sole defeat to 11-3 Kansas State. LSU, ranked No. 2 in both polls, edged out the Trojans for the Sugar Bowl berth because its schedule was harder and it lost only to 7-4 Florida, while USC got beat by 7-6 California.
Many human observers are inclined to see USC as better because its loss was months ago, while Oklahoma’s is fresh. But USC may also get an unfair edge with humans because Baton Rouge, La., home of LSU, doesn’t attract the same media attention as Los Angeles, where USC is located. The computer, however, is unmoved by such extraneous considerations.
So the sport could end up with two national champions. The winner of the Sugar Bowl automatically captures the USA Today/ESPN top ranking. But if Southern California beats Michigan in the Rose Bowl, it will most likely keep its No. 1 spot in the AP poll.
You can argue that USC is better than LSU or OU at this moment. And regardless of your view, you may get your way with one of the national championships–if USC can handle Michigan, which would love to make the whole thing moot.
In some people’s minds, the worst thing that could happen is for fans to be arguing for years about which was truly the best team of 2003. But that might also be the best thing.
