Bryan Burwell

As the so-called "national championship" chase is careening down to the final days of what we can only hope will be a confusing and confounding conclusion to the 2008 regular season, we are on the verge of the perfect Bowl Championship Series controversy, and I couldn’t be happier.

If you are like me, USC coach Pete Carroll, president-elect Barack Obama and countless other wise men who advocate the possibility of a true national championship playoff for college football, then you should be rooting hard for the Oklahoma Sooners. If all things go according to plan, by the end of the weekend the BCS picture should be one big, complicated mess and we should be able to thank the second-ranked Sooners for helping to create such a giant controversy and stir up even more anti-BCS sentiment.

Because of last weekend’s 65-21 gangster slapping of previously unbeaten and then-second ranked Texas Tech, Oklahoma was able to put into motion the possibility of the worst-case scenario that could expose all the imperfections of this phony “national championship” setup.

The Sooners are showing the flaws of both the computers and human element of the BCS process. Let’s begin with the human element. Human polls — the USA Today coaches poll and the Harris Interactive poll — showed their one big flaw, curious subjectively, when they decided that OU’s big victory last week was worth jumping the Sooners (second in the coaches poll, third in the Harris) over Texas (fourth in both polls) in their weekly rankings.

So what makes that so strange?

Well the only loss on Oklahoma’s otherwise impressive season slate is a 10-point loss to the once-beaten Longhorns.

It doesn’t make sense does it?

Of course not, but that’s good news.

It’s good news because it’s just one more example of the flaws of this stupid system that creates more confusion than conclusion. OU loses to Texas on a neutral field by 10 points, Texas loses on the road on the last play of the game to a then-unbeaten Texas Tech, and the next week Oklahoma smokes Tech by 44 points in Lubbock. So in the weird connect-the-dots subjectivity of the BCS ranking procedures, there is a very high probability that OU will still end up ahead of Texas in this week’s BCS rankings if they both finish in a three-way tie with Tech for the Big 12 South title.

Special feature Boomer Sooner Check out Oklahoma quarterback and Heisman winner Sam Bradford in action. NBCSports.com

Let the confusion begin.

The Big 12 South winner then gets its ticket punched to the Big 12 championship game based on those confusing calculations that involve pollsters and six computers. The three-way tiebreaker is the BCS standings, which in this case becomes much bigger than a trip to the Big 12 title game. By extension, the division winner becomes the most logical team to be invited to the BCS national championship game.

So once again, we’re about to pick a national champion the wrong way. It’s computers and pollsters. It’s politicking and subjectivity. This is sports, not a political campaign. We shouldn’t be testing which way the wind blows in a national championship discussion except after a coin flip.

Yet that’s exactly what is going to happen. And to make matters worse, if Texas, which is ranked No. 2 in the BCS standings, and OU (ranked third by the BCS) both win this week, Texas will probably get shafted by the BCS rankings. With the Sooners facing 12th-ranked Oklahoma State, their victory will look better in the computer and human polls than Texas' victory over a Texas A&M team whose 4-7 record will hurt the Longhorns’ strength of schedule.

“I don’t think this week was good news for Texas,” BCS independent analyst Jerry Palm told the Associated Press. “Oklahoma can only get better in all three parts of the formula and Texas can’t. I would expect if Oklahoma wins ... they’d finish ahead of Texas.”

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