the BCS "champions"

Congrats to the Gators. Interesting fact: Florida's margin of victory against Oklahoma was exactly the same as Texas' (10 points). Mack Brown's crew, however, didn't have a month to prepare for the Sooner hurry-up offense; they got mugged in the middle of the regular season like everyone else.

This is all, of course, beside the point made yesterday that Florida's other major win, the one against Alabama that justified sending them to the Mythical National Championship, was surpassed by Utah, who finished at number 2 in AP poll (ahead of Oklahoma) and got 16 first place votes. As in, one quarter of AP voters think Utah, not Florida, is the best team in the country (at least, now that they've finally bothered to watch them play).

Furthermore, maybe Tebow and Harvin could hang 24 on the Sooner D with that sloppy effort, but how much do you think they'd manage against Rey Maualuga and the Trojans (who finished number 2 in the coaches poll, ahead of Oklahoma)?

Thanks to the BCS, you'll never get to see these matchups!

I'd like to say a little more about Utah. We've now seen definitively that a non-BCS conference team has no chance of becoming champions even if:

* they've already won a BCS game several years before,
* they're the only team to go undefeated,
* they beat four top 25 teams in the regular season,
* they smoke Nick Saban's former number 1 team in a BCS bowl, and
* both of the teams in the Mythical National Championship Game play poorly.

That, my friends, is ineligibility. As if that's not enough of a slap in the face to the non-BCS conferences, I learned something new about the way money is allocated for BCS bowl bids yesterday. Did you know that, when a BCS conference team lands a spot in one of the big games, they get $16 million split among the teams in their conference, but non-BCS teams have to split that $16 million among all 5 non BCS conferences?

That means that, assuming the money was split evenly in all cases, Virginia Tech, for instance, received $1.3 million, USC got $1.6 million, and the University of Cincinnati received $2 million. In the Sugar Bowl this year, the University of Alabama received $1.3 million, plus another $1.3 million for Florida's appearance this week, giving them a $2.6 million bonanza. Their victorious opponent, the University of Utah, went home with $355,556.