Thank you, Associated Press. Thanks for refusing to participate in the bad joke known as the BCS — Bowl Championship Scam. Eliminate the middle letter, and you've got a more accurate acronym for the latest scheme to determine the collegiate football championship and avoid the playoff everyone with a brain wants and deserves.
AP, which has served as a major football poll since 1936, requested in a letter that the BCS stop using its poll in its formula to determine a champion because such an affiliation "has harmed" its reputation "for honesty and integrity."
"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 letter said.
Unfortunately, the pinheads who run the BCS still don't get it. Kevin Weiberg, commissioner of the Big Ten and one of the geniuses who oversees the BCS, said the BCS will turn to other organizations for polls — the Football Writers Association, for example, or other publications, and combine it with USA Today/ESPN and the six computer polls. Or possibly it will consider a selection committee like the one that is used for basketball.
"We need to think about whether there are those kinds of alternatives," said Weiberg.
But not a playoff system.
Back to the drawing board. This will mark the sixth time they have changed the BCS formula since it was created in 1998. They keep reshuffling the same old parts of a broken system, hoping for something better — the weighting of the polls, eliminating wins over Division 1-AA schools, quality of wins, strength of schedule, new formulas, victory margin, blah, blah, blah.
If these guys were inventing the airplane, they'd still be jumping off a cliff with paper wings.
Now that AP has had the guts to withdraw from the sham, USA Today/ESPN, whose coaches poll is used by the BCS, should do the same thing. Any other organization that is approached by the BCS should refuse to cooperate. Especially the media.
Why is the media involved in this thing? It's a blatant conflict of interest. Reporters are supposed to cover the news, not make the news. By participating in polls, they're helping to determine which teams go to bowl games and which teams get millions of dollars.
In its letter to the BCS, AP said some of its poll voters had indicated they might no longer participate because of concerns over having their reporters be so closely involved in the process of determining which teams play where. Exactly.
All such considerations aside, the media isn't cut out for the job anyway. Reporters vote for or against teams they rarely, if ever, even see play. They base their votes on scores from the newspaper and familiarity with a few of the traditional powers. They have their own biases — the conference they cover, teams from their state, the loyalties of their readership.
Any news organization with a sense of propriety should ban all reporters from participating in the polls.
But USA Today isn't buying into it. Monte Lorell, the managing editor, put it this way: "The integrity of the coaches' poll is the most important thing, and we stand behind that. The decision to include the poll in the selection process is made by the BCS and the coaches."
Well, Monte, nice try. The coaches' poll has no integrity. Not when the coaches vote secretly and refuse to reveal their ballots. Not when four coaches vote Cal seventh and two coaches vote Cal eighth after Cal wins a road game — and the previous week not one of the 65 coaches who vote in the poll voted Cal lower than sixth.
Not when Texas coach Mack Brown openly lobbies voters after his final regular-season game, triggering a deluge of e-mail from Texas fans to voters. Not when the Pac 10 commissioner demands an explanation from six coaches for their final regular-season vote, which helped Texas leapfrog a more deserving Cal team into a BCS Bowl.
Coaches have no more business participating in the polls than media. They have vested interests in schools and conferences. A vote here and there can mean millions of dollars, as well as national exposure, to a coach's team or to his conference.
As writer David Jones of the Patriot News noted while explaining the Cal-Texas dilemma early this month, before the final poll, "There are 12 coaches who are extremely interested in the outcome. They are the seven Big 12 and five Pac-10 coaches on the ESPN/USA Today poll. If Texas, currently No. 5 in the BCS rankings, passes No. 4 Cal, the Big 12 will split that extra $4.5M in 12 sections. That's $375,000 per conference school. If Cal holds on and retains the No. 4 spot, that's $4.5M split 10 ways for the Pac-10 schools, or $450,000 per program."
Neither coaches nor media should be participating in polls, which leaves only one alternative: a playoff. Unfortunately, nobody at the BCS seems to be getting the message.
E-mail: drob@desnews.com