‘Every Game Counts’ — until it doesn’t

THE SAME PEOPLE who said LSU was the best team in college football all season had to concede that Alabama was the far better team Monday night.

So who’s really No. 1?

That depends on whether you buy into the BCS’ version of a national title. Remember that after you strip away the pseudo-science, fuzzy math and constant tweaks, the BCS champion is still decided by a poll of coaches — and a prearranged one at that.

So maybe the only thing everyone can agree on is that when LSU coach Les Miles said after the game, “That’s for the voters to figure,” he certainly wasn’t lobbying his fellow coaches. They are required to put the winner of the BCS title game on the top line of their final ballot, which, as one frequent critic of the cartel noted, is “like a North Korean election.”

Alabama was the overwhelming No. 1 choice in the final Associated Press poll as well, but not unanimous. The Tide rolled up 55 first-place votes among the 60 ballots cast; Oklahoma State tallied four and LSU received the final one. It’s that lone vote for the Tigers, though, that’s stuck in the craw of the BCS faithful the day after, likely because the guy who cast it, Erik Gee of KNML-AM in Albuquerque, N.M., said he intended to pick LSU no matter how the rematch turned out. And it turns out he’s got plenty to back him up.

Alabama and LSU are 1-1 head-to-head. LSU, in addition to being the SEC champion — at ’Bama’s expense, no less — also played a much tougher schedule. The Tigers were 5-1 against teams that finished in the final AP Top 25, and 8-1 against teams ranked at the time they played; Alabama was 2-1 and 4-1 in those situations. Oklahoma State, meanwhile, finished 4-0 against teams in the final Top 25 and likely would have claimed Alabama’s spot in the title were it not for an emotional overtime loss at lowly Iowa State.

All the people going after Gee on message boards are aiming their barbs at the wrong target. It’s the BCS that’s making a mockery out of college football, and if TV ratings are any indication, fans are growing tired of the constant promises to get it right. The 14.0 rating for what was an almost-unbearable kicking contest was the second-lowest of the 14 BCS title games. Even so, that left plenty of people mad at Gee.

“It hasn’t been nearly as bad today as I expected,” he said in a telephone interview Tuesday. “But I’ll be clear one more time: I don’t dislike Alabama. If the roles had been reversed, I would have picked Alabama.”

Gee is a 39-year-old radio host who knows his way around a controversy. For the record, he grew up all over the country as the son of a Marine-turned-high-school football coach and graduated from Oklahoma with a degree in journalism. An examination of his ballots shows a consistent, conscientious voter. Plus, he can defend himself, something Gee has been doing often since first announcing his decision to stick with LSU in early December. That was right after the BCS blithely ignored two of its own unwritten rules — a team must win its conference championship; the title game shouldn’t be a rematch of a regular-season game — so Alabama and LSU could meet again in Super Dome.

We used to call the national championship “mythical,” and despite the Frankenstein-like creation that is the BCS and until there’s a playoff, it will stay that way. Only the names of the schools that get kicked to the curb changes from year to year.

The feeling here is never, ever trust the BCS. It keeps boasting “Every Game Counts” even though its own national title matchup proved it didn’t.