It took six seasons for the Associated Press to realize it was being used by an inherently flawed and unjust system. But at last it has disassociated itself from the BCS and its fraudulent national college football championship.

We can only hope that this is the signal event that finally will trigger the collapse of the current bowl system and force the university presidents who have so zealously and wrong-headedly preserved it to come to their senses. It is long past the time when college football determines its best team in the only venue in which championships can be won — on the field of play.

Now it’s up to the coaches to show that they have the same integrity that the AP finally discovered. Their poll, run under the aegis of USA Today, is the one of what were three components of the BCS. The AP poll of 65 writers and broadcasters was another. The average of six computer ranking systems is the third.

Asking anyone involved with big-time college football to do the right thing is like asking fourth graders not to laugh at potty jokes. But the AP’s sudden attack of good sense could be the lever that we have needed to pry the coaches into the open and bust the BCS for good.

It’s time for everyone who loves sports — precisely because they give us clear winners and losers without the ambiguity that is inherent in most of what we do — to demand that the coaches follow the AP’s lead. They talk about courage and character and doing the right thing, but they continue to support an absurd system, casting their votes — often through their school’s sports information directors — in anonymity. Some of them grumble about being left out of a major bowl or the national championship game, but they don’t have the guts to stand up and demand to know how their colleagues and rivals voted. They don’t have the guts to say how they voted themselves.

The AP identifies its 65 voters and how they vote. It was the least that organization could do as long as its poll was used to determine the match-ups in the showcase events of the college football calendar. The AP never signed on to the BCS system when it was created in 1998, but it didn’t object to its poll being used to determine BCS rankings.

But now, with three teams from major conferences — Auburn, USC and Oklahoma — and two others — Boise State and Utah — all undefeated, and only USC and Oklahoma going to the alleged championship game, the AP says it does not want to be used. It doesn’t want to be associated in the minds of fans with decisions that the AP, as an organization of journalists, has no right making.

The BCS folks say they’ll think of something else to use to keep their broken system going. A selection committee like that used for the NCAA basketball tournament might be considered.

How preposterous. The basketball committee picks 64 teams to play in a tournament, with the champion being decided over three weeks of play. That’s the only way it should be, the way it is with every other college sport, including college football at every level except Division I-A. To apply a selection committee to the task of deciding which two of five undefeated teams get to play a meaningful game is compounding injustice.

The only thing that will fix what ails the BCS is dynamite.

Blow it up. Throw it on the scrap heap of failed ideas. Replace it with a championship series, not smoke and mirrors and microprocessors and secret ballots and guys in pointy hats and black robes tossing newt eyes and yak spleens into a cauldron and watching to see what bubbles to the surface.

“By stating that the AP poll is one of the three components used by BCS to establish its rankings, BCS conveys the impression that AP condones or otherwise participates in the BCS system,” the AP said in a letter to the BCS. “Furthermore, to the extent that the public does not fully understand the relationship between BCS and AP, any animosity toward BCS may get transferred to AP. And to the extent that the public has equated or comes to equate the AP poll with the BCS rankings, the independent reputation of the AP poll is lost.”

It took six years for the AP to realize that, and, were it not for the split championship last year and the mess this year, it might have taken 15 more. So we should be grateful to all the undefeated teams as well as to the one-loss teams Texas and Cal for forcing the AP to do the right thing.

For the time being, it takes us back to those inglorious days of yesteryear when split championships were rather common. Until the BCS gives up the bad fight, we will have an AP champ and a BCS champ and no real champ.

Which means it’s the coaches’ turn to act. They’re the ones whose teams are being cheated out of a chance to compete for the championship, and yet they continue to support the system that cheats them. They have to stand up to their university presidents and to their conferences that have sweetheart deals with the big bowls and demand that college football do the right thing.

They have to join the AP in walking out of the system and out of the past. It’s time for them to say they’re going to stop cheating themselves and their players. It’s time for them to demand what every other sport has — a champion determined in playoffs on the field.

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