Jim Litke: A nice, tidy package

By JIM LITKE/AP Sports Writer MIAMI (AP) _ A nice, tidy package. That's what the Oklahoma Sooners left on the BCS doorstep Thursday morning, a present that the men who hijacked

Friday, January 5th 2001, 12:00 am

By: News On 6

By JIM LITKE/AP Sports Writer

MIAMI (AP) _ A nice, tidy package.

That's what the Oklahoma Sooners left on the BCS doorstep Thursday morning, a present that the men who hijacked college football three seasons ago neither earned nor deserved.

A few hours earlier, the suits in charge of the Bowl Championship Series were looking at an awful mess _ a split national championship, with at least one more team able to stake a legitimate claim to its own share of a title. But then the Sooners mopped up the floor of the Orange Bowl with Florida State and rendered all the arguments about finding a real champion moot.

Make no mistake: Oklahoma is worthy. Everybody recognizes that. The Sooners swept the smart human vote, collecting all 71 first-place votes in the final Associated Press poll and all 59 in the ESPN/USA Today coaches' poll. And they reminded the not-so-smart ones manning BCS-approved computers that no matter how many numbers you crunch, one thing remains constant: Garbage in, garbage out.

``We never bothered to figure the BCS formula out,'' Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops said at the end of a morning spent picking up trophies. ``All we knew is that if you don't lose, you would have a great chance of winning it all.

``That's sort of the way it worked out.''

A team can't do more than beat every opponent put in front of it. The Sooners did that 13 times, saving their most convincing beating for last.

They held a Florida State team that averaged 547 yards and 42 points per game _ averaged! _ to 301 yards and two points. They squeezed the Seminoles' Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback, Chris Weinke, like he was a lemon. Oklahoma's defense was so dominating that it left FSU coach Bobby Bowden wondering whether his team, favored by double digits at kickoff, should have been in the championship game after all.

``When I look at it now, it probably should have been Miami playing Oklahoma,'' he said. ``I didn't think we looked like we belonged out there. I thought Miami looked a lot better the other night (beating Florida in the Sugar Bowl) than we looked.

``It could be that Oklahoma is just so good that they would have done that to whoever they played. They beat Kansas State twice; beating Nebraska like they did, that is kind of hard to do, too,'' Bowden added. ``They just might be a super ballclub.''

``Might'' seems particularly appropriate in this case, since Miami (11-1) also beat Florida State this season and Washington (11-1) beat Miami. And neither got a shot at Oklahoma. We have the BCS to thank for that.

The BCS is the latest reincarnation of what was the Bowl Coalition, and the Bowl Alliance before that. By whatever name, its goal was to match No. 1 and No. 2 at the end of every season. But its real reason for being is to block the same playoff system that decides every other championship in college sports from being used in Division I football.

That way, its television partners, the two dozen bowls and the local chambers of commerce propping those bowls are guaranteed a steady flow of cash and a captive audience.

Whether it's the best system for college football isn't open to debate, since the current BCS-TV contract runs through January 2006. But the guys running the scam know the quickest way to lose customers is playing a championship game that fails to produce a worthy champion.

Two seasons ago, three contenders lost on the last weekend of the regular season, thinning out the herd enough to make a consensus No. 1 vs. No. 2 matchup possible.

This season, the BCS shifted more of the responsibility from men to machines, hoping that pseudo-science would make their version of 1 vs. 2 more credible. What saved their bacon was a very underrated Oklahoma team deflating an overrated Florida State squad.

Instead of taking the backroom politicians out of the equation, the BCS has strengthened their hand. Two seasons ago, Kansas State lost its conference championship and a shot at an undefeated season in overtime _ the last possible second of the season _ and slipped all the way from playing for the national title, with a guaranteed $13 million payout, to the Alamo Bowl and a $1 million purse.

This year, Notre Dame finished behind both Nebraska and Virginia Tech in the BCS' own rankings, but leapfrogged both to grab an invitation to one of four BCS-controlled bowls. Yet Oregon State beat the Irish so badly in the Fiesta Bowl that it mocked the merit-based argument the BCS loves to hide behind. At the same time, the Beavers showed themselves to be the kind of team that could make a four- or even-eight-team playoff so intriguing.

``Remember,'' said Rocky Calmus the Oklahoma linebacker, ``even though we were unbeaten, everybody said we should have even been in the Orange Bowl. I'd hate to think what our chances would have been if we'd made one slip-up along the way _ like everybody else.''

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Jim Litke is the national sports columnist for The Associated Press. Write to him at jlitkeap.org