Despite all BCS flaws, Tigers are the champs COMMENTARY By Mike Bianchi The Orlando Sentinel January 5, 2004 NEW ORLEANS - 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. Advertisement 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 they beat Michigan by two touchdowns in the Rose Bowl? Me neither. After LSU's simmering 21-14 victory Sunday 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 USC 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. Isn't that the great thing about sports - that the best of the best has a chance to prove it in the arena? 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? 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 popu-lar vote gets you. The system - as flawed and fouled up as it is - has spoken. LSU is the champion.
