Don’t think NFL playoffs outdo BCS

Brand me a BCS apologist if you insist. I don’t really care.

It’s become an exhausting argument because if those screaming the loudest about remedying college football’s ills would stop and take a breath, they’d realize that nobody’s sick. The game’s never been stronger fiscally. Revenues are up. Interest is up.

And so, too, are the blood pressures of those in Utah and Texas.

The curtain can’t come down on another college football season without somebody yapping about how they were jobbed by a badly flawed system. Utah believes it’s most deserving of national championship consideration because the Utes finished the bowl season as the nation’s lone unbeaten team.

The Utes smacked former No. 1 Alabama in the mouth in the Sugar Bowl.

Florida smacked the Tide in the mouth in the SEC title game when Alabama was No. 1 in the country. And then they slapped around the Tide’s successor atop the mountain, the BCS ranking’s No. 1 Oklahoma, in the championship game Thursday night.

When you’ve toppled No. 1 in successive games, there is no debate.

That won’t appease those complainers who will cry they were wronged through the greed of an unholy cartel of six conference commissioners and four bowl presidents. But the fallacy that few see is how a college football playoff eliminates “the screwed factor.”

It only accentuates it. It only gives more people more cause to cry “Unfair!” when it best suits their interests.

Playoffs aren’t necessarily the panacea.

You don’t think that 11-5 New England believes there’s something fundamentally flawed in the NFL playoff structure that left it home for the sake of rewarding an 8-8 divisional winner?

You don’t think that 12-4 Indianapolis is fuming now that they’re at home, winners of their last nine regular-season games but nonetheless sent on the road to 8-8 San Diego, where they lost in overtime?

Playoffs aren’t the absolute, irrefutable resolution that the BCS whiners insist.

Do you really think the NFL got it right this year?

Rip the computers at your pleasure, but if BCS principles dictated NFL playoff policy in determining the 12 most worthy teams for the Super Bowl tournament, you can rest assured that the Patriots would be invited while the Chargers wouldn’t earn any special favor for winning a division that’s, at best, marginally competitive.

But nobody dares call out the NFL. It gets a free pass. But it’s no different than college football in that it’s most popular when the big teams and the big stars dominate our attention.

There is no perfect solution for college football because the four major bowls will continually pull the strings. And they’ll remain more concerned about tourism than touchdowns.

A playoff might improve TV ratings, but the bowls are about putting bodies in the seats of stadiums, hotels, restaurants and bars for as many days as possible.

That’s not hard to figure out. And it’s not changing. That’s why the BCS playoff arguments become hackneyed. There are logical reasons why nothing’s changing anytime soon. That reality stares the screamers directly in their face, but they’ll happily pretend that they don’t exist.