Does Colorado deserve to play for a BCS bid? How about Tennessee? To the exclusion of Texas and Georgia?

Next week they do. They play in the their respective conference championships. If they beat Oklahoma and/or Auburn they would automatically get into a BCS bowl. Despite teams within their own conference having better records and higher rankings, the division format seems to unfairly reward these teams with an extra opportunity to make it into the BCS. Yeah, maybe the odds are long, and no one really believes they have a chance.

But that’s just it. They get a chance.

So does any team in a BCS confernence. Duke, Vandy, Wake Forest, Baylor, Kansas, Missouri, Oregon St., Washington St., Indiana, Iowa St., and Kentucky. Other than conference affiliation, what have any of these teams done in the last 20-35 years done to earn an easier path to a BCS bowl and/or a national championship than teams like Pitt, WVU and Syracuse?

They haven’t. Pitt won the national championship in ’77. Was a regular contender for the national title for ’70s and early ’80s. WVU nearly won it in ’88 or ’89. Syracuse got close in the ’90s.

The system is set up for the benefit of conferences not teams. Until college football establishes some sort of European soccer rules for teams and moving between divisions as you achieve and improve (dear god, I just sort of gave some props to soccer), you go by conferences and their champions.

So if you are going to allow all teams from the SEC, Big XII, Big 11, ACC and PAC-10 to have a shot every year, you can’t dis the Big East because this is a down year. They are not playing for a national championship. Just like teams from the ACC, Big 11 and either the Big XII or SEC won’t be this year. They are playing for money and prestige (mainly money).

So the sanctimonious crap about who deserves what is just white noise. The Big East isn’t going anywhere, neither are the teams within the Big East. You can’t have it all ways. And guess what? Even if there was a playoff, it would still be very, very dependent on conferences. That’s just the nature of the beast.