Column: Season that saved the BCS? Kidding me, right?

The nature of college football needs another SEC runaway in the BCS National Championship Game about as much as Jerry Jones needs another night out on the club scene.

That’s a scene Alabama, LSU and Florida (twice) could have gone to celebrate without even showing up for their respective title games.

What’s to say this year will present a different scenario for the SEC’s usually incredibly inferior championship game opponent?

Speed kills, so they say, and it’s what is going to kill a long run of boring, laughable, go-to-bed-after-the-third-quarter championship games in recent history. Whether or not it’s a good or a bad thing, this year’s game could put a temporary halt to the “end the BCS” jeers everyone from President Obama to football fans at Kilroy’s is echoing.

For a second, let’s say Auburn and Oregon play a title game for the ages, a 2005 Rose Bowl-esque game. Let’s also say Wisconsin hangs 100 on TCU (which Bret Bielema would probably try to defend). The BCS will have finally gotten it right in the eyes of the fair-weather fans and influential BCS advocators around the country with the common sense argument that TCU was overrated and fairly forced to board a plane destined for Pasadena rather than Glendale.

Behind all the X’s and O’s, game planning and worthless external arguments about too much layoff, speed — a simple distance-divided-by-time equation — could be the one thing saving a system criticized more than Communism in the 1950s.

It’s what Texas didn’t have enough of to make up for an injured Colt McCoy in last year’s Citi BCS National Championship Game, and it’s what Ohio State didn’t have nearly enough of on the defensive side of the ball in 2006 and 2007 in its championship bids.

Take a gander back to 2006 when the Buckeyes gave up just 280.5 yards per game before they ran into a different kind of spread option attack against Florida that following January. Jim Tressel’s boys gave up 370 in that final game compared to their 82 total yards of offense.

No answer for speed on the outside? No glass ball for you. Tressel and other coaches around the country know it and are adjusting. They have to. Last year, it looked like a completely new school of thought took over in Columbus, Ohio, as Ohio State beat Oregon and their speedy offense in the Rose Bowl.

No one outside of the SEC knows it more than Oregon, whose offense has enough speed in guys like Heisman finalist LaMichael James to make Road Runner look like he runs a five-second 40.

Even if the Ducks or Tigers win a lopsided bout along with Wisconsin, is there really any legitimate argument out there saying the two best teams weren’t selected? Wisconsin is as old-school as Will Ferrell, and no one wants to see another Big Ten power get blown out on the season’s final day.

In a way, it’s exactly what college football needs. It’s something to finally kill the outrageous arguments for an all-out, month-long playoff. It would take too long, and the human body isn’t made to compete in that type of gruel for that amount of time.

No, hell is not freezing over. The haters are and will still be there, as will their just arguments for a restructuring of the BCS into the form of a shortened playoff. But what is on the brink of occurring is something college football hasn’t seen in the BCS’s 12 years of existence — something saving the system.


E-mail: ftherber@indiana.edu