I really don't follow college football (that's American football for our overseas readers), but right now it's impossible to avoid discussions about the "National Championship" and about how the evil computer rankings employed by the Bowl Championship Series to determine who plays for the championship are to blame for what will probably be a split title between University of Southern California and Louisiana State University. See, for example, this article .

It's easy to bash rankings based on an arcane algorithm that no one understands, especially since it is "obvious" that Oklahoma didn't belong in the title game after losing their conference championship (in ugly fashion) to Kansas State. But let me make the case for the computers not being nuts.

You have three teams, each with one loss, that everyone agrees are tops in the country (leaving aside the question of why other one-loss teams from small conferences get no consideration here). How do you separate them? You could look at the three losses. Oklahoma's loss was ill-timed, but it was arguably the "best" of the losses, since K-State finished the season ranked #10. LSU's loss was to another ranked team, Florida, who finished at #17. USC, whom the humans anointed #1 after Oklahoma's stumble, lost to Cal, which finished unranked with a mediocre 8-6 record. Not a ringing endorsement of USC.

You could also look at the quality of the wins. Oklahoma looks pretty good here, too, having absolutely killed all their conference opponents and notching wins against Texas (#5) and Oklahoma State (#22) in the process. LSU's margins were less lopsided, but they beat Georgia (#11) twice and Mississippi (#18) along the way. USC had impressive wins, but they beat only one team to make the final top 25: Washington State (#14). They closed the season strong, but two of their last three pre-bowl opponents were sub-.500 (Arizona and UCLA), and they were never tested in a conference championship game because the Pac-10 doesn't have one. Again, USC doesn't seem to rise to the top.

Frankly, I don't know how the humans could come to the conclusion that USC was the #1 team in the nation going into the bowls. They have a decent argument for #2 -- if you insist on counting a loss against a very good team in December as a greater sin than a loss against a mediocre team in September -- but if anything, LSU should probably be complaining that they were underrated by the humans and so denied their chance at an outright championship.

The truth is, the human rankings tend to be very short-sighted. They react in knee-jerk fashion to anything bad (a loss or a close win against a team perceived to be bad) and otherwise generally retain the status quo. USC was #2 when Oklahoma lost, so naturally they were #1 afterwards, regardless of what anyone else did. Balancing these emotional reactions of the humans with the broader and impartial (not to say infallible) perspective provided by the computer calculations strikes me as a perfectly reasonable idea, and I refuse to be appalled by the result.

All of which is not to say that I like the BCS system as it stands. To simply proclaim a number one and number two based on any ranking system and have them, and only them, play one game for the championship is bound to get you in trouble. Football should have a playoff system like every other sport. There'd still be grumblings about who gets the fourth or eighth or sixteenth spot and about seedings, but you could at least point at the final winner as having earned something. But that is not going to happen because the bowl organizers and the conferences that make up the BCS refuse to give up their special status. BCS chair Mike Traghese admits as much:

And Tranghese said that the system, imperfect though it is, will remain in place because the six BCS conferences are not going to do anything to jeopardize their standing in the postseason.

"Every one of us is selfish," Tranghese said. "We're going to do what we want to do to protect our conference."

The real problem with the college football championship is not computers but greed. Human greed.