Jim Litke AP columnist

This is why you’ve got to love the newly reconstituted BCS:

Shortly after he was invited to vote in a poll that college football’s OPEC-style cartel will use to choose a champion, John Mackovic began scanning the list of names that would join him.

After coaching at Wake Forest, Illinois, Texas and Arizona, as well as the NFL’s Kansas City Chiefs and working as a TV analyst, it’s fair to say Mackovic knows plenty of people connected to the game. But what he saw still surprised him.

“To tell the truth,” Mackovic wrote in a recent guest column for The Desert Sun of Palm Springs, Calif., “I did not know a couple of them were still alive.”

Maybe it’s just me, but this hardly sounds like a good way for the Bowl Championship Series to begin it’s fifth (sixth? who can keep count?) reincarnation. C’mon, even Shirley MacLaine got it right after that many tries.

And if the only gripe about the makeup of the new, 114-member Harris Interactive poll panel was the presence of a few grizzled veterans — “people ... who have long since departed their active roles in football,” is the genteel way Mackovic phrased it — that would hardly merit a mention. There are plenty of aged sportswriters and broadcasters voting in The Associated Press poll, too.

But it’s not.

In the last few days, ESPN told four of its employees, coaches-turned-commentators Lou Holtz and Gerry DiNardo, analyst John Congemi and play-by-play man Sam Smith, they would not be allowed to take part in the poll because it is being used by the BCS to determine which teams play for its national championship. That was the reason the AP gave last winter in ordering the BCS to stop using its poll as one of three equally weighted components in determining the BCS rankings. It was cited again Thursday by ESPN spokesman Josh Krulewitz, who added the network’s “decision is consistent given our decision to pull out of the coaches’ poll.”

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But that wasn’t the BCS’ only oops, either.

Now it will also have to replace a fifth voter, Jason Rash, after discovering his only connection to college football was his father-in-law, Troy University coach Larry Blakeney.

“I was disappointed,” Rash said Thursday from Atlanta, where he runs a masonry-supply business. “I would have taken it seriously and done a good job at it. Larry and I have had a lot of in-depth discussions about football and I watch a lot of games.”