Sugar Bowl champion will only win by a fraction

Imagine the winners of tonight's Oklahoma-LSU game leaving the Sugar Bowl waving crooked fingers toward the sky and chanting, "We're No. 1/2."

That won't happen, thankfully, but only because the truth-in-advertising laws don't apply to college football. Otherwise, the poor kids wouldn't have a choice.

For the first time since the Bowl Championship Series hijacked the postseason a half-dozen years ago and turned it over to computers with the promise of delivering an undisputed champion, there will be more of a dispute than ever. Some progress.

Southern Cal staked its claim Thursday night in the Rose Bowl by whipping Michigan and virtually assuring itself the No. 1 spot in the final Associated Press poll and the national championship trophy that goes along with it. The Oklahoma-LSU winner gets the BCS version of that same trophy and the No. 1 spot in the final USA Today/ESPN coaches' poll.

What the rest of us get is an argument without end.

"If that's the worst thing the BCS has done," BCS chief Mike Tranghese said in a telephone conversation on the eve of the Sugar Bowl, "then it's not such a bad thing after all.

"We live in an age when everybody wants a clean, simple NFL-style playoff. Well, we're not the NFL. But it's interesting that the NFL playoffs are going on even as we're talking and everybody is still talking about college football."

You could make the argument the same discussion would be going on, and that it would grow even more clamorous if a playoff between Southern Cal and the Sugar Bowl champion was in the offing. But it's not worth the bother, at least not at the moment.

Tranghese, who is commissioner of the Big East and doubles as BCS chief this season as part of a rotation among the commissioners of the six major conferences, said a playoff won't even be on the agenda when the BCS meets in four months to consider changes to the system.

A day earlier, he told USA Today that he would like to see more weight given to the polls -- the so-called "human" element in the BCS formula -- in determining which teams play for the BCS championship. But Tranghese made clear Saturday that he was speaking for himself, not the organization he heads.

"I didn't present that as a BCS solution. What I said was I was a proponent of the human element from the beginning."

The BCS formula uses the two polls, seven computer rankings, strength of schedule, losses and a bonus-point system for quality wins to arrive at its rankings. The AP poll relies on humans. The men vs. machines debate has raged ever since, and the events of this season will only raise the decibel level even higher.

The suits in charge of the BCS knew this day was coming. At the outset, their worst nightmare was reaching the end of the regular season with only two spots in the championship game for three deserving teams. They tried tweaking the formula and more than once, late-season upsets saved their bacon by papering over that fundamental flaw. But there was no such luck this time around.

As a result, Oklahoma coach Bob Stoops and his LSU counterpart, Nick Saban, have been left to justify their good fortune. The run-up to what should have been the most important game of the season has forced two of the best defensive minds in the game to be on the defensive about how they got here.

Neither has been in the mood to apologize.

"The rules were set up ahead of time," Stoops said one final time Saturday.

"As I've said time and time again, they pick 65 teams for the NCAA basketball tournament, and then Dick Vitale has a two-hour show on the eight teams that got left out," Saban said. "I think that no matter how many you pick, there's going to always be that, 'This team should have made it,' or whatever."

But this season, the arguments turned on the narrowest of margins. Three deserving teams finished with only one loss, leaving it to the computers and their strength-of-schedule component to choose two.

Oklahoma, with the 11th toughest-rated schedule according to the computers, remained No. 1 in the BCS rankings, even though the Sooners didn't win their own conference because of a 35-7 pasting by Kansas State in the Big 12 championship.

LSU leapfrogged USC and into the No. 2 spot when Boise State beat Hawaii in an otherwise meaningless game at the very end of the season because it goosed the Tigers' strength of schedule number past USC's (29th versus 37th).

So how good was that all-important strength of schedule measure the computers kicked out?

Well, Oklahoma's opponents have gone 1-6 in bowls, with the only win registered by Texas Tech over Navy. Opponents of LSU and USC, meanwhile, have turned in identical, very impressive 5-1 marks.

The battle between men and machines will continue for some time, but the humans have taken a slight lead -- about the length of half a finger or so.

Jim Litke is a national sports columnist for The Associated Press.