In another lifetime, as a writer for a paper on the East Coast, I almost laughed aloud as I sat in the office of Connecticut's athletic director. Before us lay his plan to take the school into the big time of college football, a stirring pamphlet brimming with preposterous hopes.
Back then, Connecticut screamed Division I football about as much as Saskatoon. It wasn't a place that developed much of anything athletic. Occasionally, an important football player -- Steve Young, Bill Romanowski, Eugene Robinson -- would slip through, but it usually happened, on average, about once or twice a decade. Otherwise, it was a fine yachting state, wonderful, too, for aspiring field hockey and soccer players. And, of course, basketball. But never, ever football.
"It can't work," I told the athletic director. "You guys will get killed every week."
And it was then that the athletic director told me it didn't matter if they lost every game 50-3. The point wasn't that UConn was necessarily supposed to win. It was just supposed to sit in the Big East conference, run out a football team every weekend and collect the year-end riches from the league's bowl games.
The athletic director was a wise and scheming man. He had in his charge two of the best basketball programs in the land and yet knew enough to realize that neither would bring his school the bushel of riches that losing eight games a year in the Big East ultimately could. With Miami and Virginia Tech and Boston College and Pittsburgh and Syracuse going to bowls, and then sharing their bowl game proceeds with the rest of the conference. UConn would simply have to show up for the games to be eligible for the payday.
It was an ingenious plan. And who knew, all these years later, that in its second season of Division I-A football, Connecticut would be 9-3 with wins over a Big Ten, Big East and an ACC school? But since the college's affiliation with the Big East football conference doesn't start until next year, the Huskies probably won't be going to a bowl.
And that has a lot of people upset.
"My personal opinion is we're good enough to go," Huskies quarterback Dan Orlovsky told the Connecticut Post. "I think we deserve one."
Just another reason to hate the BCS. Because with almost every bowl having some kind of tie-in to a big conference, an independent like UConn gets left out. And so begins another autumn of howling about the system that selects the bowl games.
Everywhere, someone is unhappy.
The problem is nobody has a better solution. At least not one that will work.
Forget about a playoff; no one will ever be able to agree on the right format. And with all these new super conferences and league-championship games and early-season exception games that have some colleges playing 12 and 13 Saturdays a year, there is no way anyone will add on a system that would create four to six more games.
Even a popular proposal of knocking the season down to nine or 10 games and creating a 64-team tournament will never find acceptance. The extra exposure of six playoff games would give the biggest schools an unfair advantage over the lesser teams, who would be forced to play a shorter season. More than today, it would send all the best recruits to the 10 top schools.
Starting next year, when it is officially in the Big East, UConn can use its new big-conference standing to push somebody else out of a bowl game it deserves.
Go ahead and hate the BCS. But remember this: In a flawed football world where money plays louder than the band, the BCS is the only thing that keeps us sane.
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