NEW ORLEANS (KRT) – Did you see the Purple and Gold-clad LSU fans outside the Superdome Sunday with their faces painted and their Mardi Gras beads swinging, biting the heads off boiled crawfish, drinking whiskey and chanting, “Hold that Tiger!”?
Funny, but it didn’t look like any of these people thought Southern Cal was the undisputed national champion. It didn’t look like they thought this was the Sugarless Bowl.
What about you? Do you still think USC deserves the undisputed national championship? Do you still think the Trojans are the best team in the country because it beat Michigan by two touchdowns in the Rose Bowl?
Me neither. After LSU’s simmering 21-14 victory in this steaming gumbo pot of a stadium, I vote the Tigers No. 1 in the BCS (Bianchi Common Sense) poll. LSU won one more game than USC; it played a tougher schedule; and the Tigers beat a better team in their bowl game.
So all you Trojan-come-lately Southern Cal bandwagon boosters, spare us the rhetoric about how USC deserves to be the national champion any more than LSU does.
Sure, the Trojans are a great team. But so is LSU. And, for my money, so is Miami of Ohio, which has the best quarterback in the country and also finished with a 13-1 record.
We all know the BCS is a bad system.
We all know college football is rife with unleveled playing fields where some teams play more games than others and some conferences are given more access than others.
We all know that the only way to determine a real champion is to do it the way that all the other sports do it, with an all-inclusive playoff system that doesn’t discriminate based on the stature of your school or the size of your alumni association.
Isn’t that the great thing about sports, that the best of the best has a chance to prove it in the arena?
The guy who lifts the most weight wins the bench press. The sprinter who runs the fastest time wins the 100 meters.
The team that scores the most points wins the Final Four. That’s how it is in every sport, except one.
But, with that being said, don’t you dare try to minimize what LSU did in the Sugar Bowl.
This was the national championship game, and LSU has more of a claim to the title than Southern Cal does.
And that’s the real shame of the BCS and the idiots who conceived it: The process itself has overshadowed the game it created.
The tumult and the shouting about this wigged-out system have eclipsed the passion and pageantry of this magnificent sport.
Conversation is good for sports, consternation is not. We all love bantering about big games, but the banter should not drown out the game itself.
Can you imagine if we spent the entire Super Bowl week talking about a team that wasn’t even in the Super Bowl?
Can you imagine the Patriots and the Eagles playing in the Super Bowl and Bill Belichick having to field a million questions about the Tennessee Titans being left out?
Even Big East Commissioner Mike Tranghese, the coordinator of the BCS, trashed his own system Sunday morning, just a few hours before the big game.
“We made a mistake and we should be criticized,” Tranghese told a gathering of writers. “Get rid of the computers. I hate those things.”
Thank you for that ringing endorsement, Mr. Commissioner.
Instead of this BCS nonsense, shouldn’t we have been talking about how Coach Nick Saban has resurrected the proud but dormant heritage of LSU football, conjuring up images of Billy Cannon and the Chinese Bandits while turning the Superdome into Death Valley with a roof?
We should have been talking about an LSU defense that came into the Sugar Bowl ranked No. 1 in the country and then turned Oklahoma’s Heisman-winning quarterback Jason White into Jason White-out for much of the game?
White, who threw for 40 touchdowns this season, completed only 13 of 37 passes for 102 yards, and no touchdowns.
“Why should we have to apologize for being here?” LSU quarterback Matt Mauck said on the eve of the game.
Exactly. Who says Southern Cal is the best team in the country and why do they say it?
Because its one loss came in the fourth game of the season while LSU’s came in the sixth?
If there is one good thing that can be said about the BCS, it is that it takes into account a team’s entire body of work and doesn’t just reward the team that gets hot at the end.
There are those who insist that Southern Cal is the people’s champion because it won the popular vote of the writers and the coaches.
Ask Al Gore what the popular vote gets you.
The system, as flawed and fouled-up as it is, has spoken.
LSU is the champion.
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c 2004, The Orlando Sentinel (Fla.).
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

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