University of Alabama Football Report for 11/12/04

Get out your ugliest shoes, Pauline. We're going bowling!

Granted, Alabama will likely attend one of the lower tier bowl games, perhaps the Dow Chemical Flavoring Bowl or the FlashGame.com Ad Hoc Bowl. But after two years of fake outs among the lava rocks at the Father Damien Memorial Ass Kicking, this'll do for now.

With last year's (co-)National Champion awaiting tomorrow, now's as good a time as any to mock the folly that is the BCS, this naked emperor with premium ad rates. Each year its acolytes assure us its infallibility, and each successive year they announce the changes installed to fix the problems they denied the year before. And when that fails, repeat your mantra: It's better than the bowl system.

Piffle.

What can this obscenity offer us? Not definitive winners, to be sure, but losers aplenty. If you follow a winning team throughout the season, all the BCS offers you is that your bowl game is likely meaningless. Perhaps the only thing more imbecilic than the BCS is the advocate of a play-off system.

Quick! Name one thing less relevant than college basketball's regular season.

Time's up. If you answered the Democratic Party, you're just bitter (or gloating). College football is a perfect mess. It is not the artwork pulled down to earth by the isolated flaw; it is the flaw, the felix culpa. To deny this is indefensible. College football needs the messy tribalism, the contested victories, the spurned coaches and delusional players. To paraphrase William James, O happy fault, O necessary sin of Maurice Clarett.

Roll Tide.