Holiday Bowl proves nothing

The press is jumping all over Texas Tech's 45-31 thumping of Cal in last night's Holiday Bowl as proof that somehow the convoluted BCS system "works." Even Cal coach Jeff Tedford essentially threw in the towel, as Wayne Drehs reports:

Did Texas -- not Cal -- deserve the BCS spot in the Rose Bowl?

Before the reporter even finished, running back J.J. Arrington shook his head in disgust. Quarterback Aaron Rodgers mumbled something about the query being "stupid." And Tedford answered, as only he knew how.

"What do you want me to say?" the California coach said. "They're right? They got it right. Then they're right. There. I don't know what you want me to say."

But they're not right. Once again, the collective pea-sized brain of the media establishment fails to comprehend that it is not the particular outcome that matters, but it is the selection process that matters. Aaron Rodgers is right: the question is stupid.

This is what matters: Mack Brown was able to successfully lobby a few voters into changing their non-disclosed ballots enough to get Texas into the BCS in favor of Cal. There was absolutely no on-the-field evidence to support the change. If these voters were privy to some underlying weakness in Cal that somehow manifest itself to them and them only the last week of the college football regular season, then I'd like to see how much money they made off betting against Cal in the Holiday Bowl, where the Bears were 10-point favorites.

Of course, we all know that the voters didn't have any such information; they simply did it as a personal favor to Coach Mack and thereby sent millions of dollars to Austin instead of to Berkeley. That's corruption. Period. How does the fact that Cal happened to lose their next game change that? It doesn't. Are you trying to tell me that a coach convincing his buddies to vote for his team and then getting lucky on a coin-flip of a bowl game a month later is proof that the system works?

Similarly with Utah. Lots of people point to their getting to the Fiesta Bowl as proof that the system works for the non-BCS conferences, too. Hogwash. One team getting in out of five years of playing the game does not constitute a fair system. Everyone knows that the margin of error for non-BCS conference schools is so razor-thin as to be ludicrous. That Utah was able to miraculously successfully navigate themselves into the money bowls does not change the fact that the system is fundamentally unfair to these schools (see also Boise State, and also Urban Meyer, who knows that he can get back to the BCS from Florida a lot easier than he can from Utah). And yet the NCAA and the media establishment, which has itself been bought by the money bowls, continue to ignore this.

Now, if Pittsburgh beats Utah in the Fiesta Bowl, the media will undoubtedly jump all over that as more "proof" that the system works. But in reality, the outcome of that game doesn't matter, either. For one thing, as I've pointed out above, bowl games are essentially a crapshoot anyway. To me, the fact that Utah is currently favored going into the game is more important than the actual outcome of the game. Because remember that what we're doing here is trying to determine the best matchups for the bowl games, and so naturally we necessarily have to do this before the games! The spread going into a game represents a market-based assessment of that matchup before the game and is ergo in this case a confirmation that Utah belongs in the game.

Of course, this whole discussion is itself merely a confirmation that the whole system is as corrupt and screwed up as it can be.