So you can probably read about it on any website’s sports section, but some of the BCS bowl selections leave you scratching your head. The national championship game pits Big Ten champ Ohio State versus SEC champ LSU. Every team near the top that has at least a small claim to the championship game has a holes in their argument - including these two - and my feeling is that everyone in college football accepts, but not 100% convinced of, these teams’ selection. All the more reason to have a playoff system that removes all doubt as to who should be in the game.

I thought the BCS selection rules were that the big six conference champs and the rest of the top 10 ranked teams get the ten available BCS bowl game spots, but that doesn’t explain the absence of #6 Missouri - get to that in a minute.

The Sugar and Fiesta Bowls got it right: red-hot #5 Georgia versus undefeated #10 Hawaii and Big East champ #9 West Virginia against Big 12 champ #4 Oklahoma.

The Orange Bowl has ACC champ #3 Virginia Tech against #8 Kansas. Kansas? Yes, they (11-1) have one less loss than #6 Missouri (11-2), but that second Missouri loss was in the Big 12 championship game, which they got to by beating Kansas the week before. Kansas’s only argument is that they went undefeated most of the season in a high-profile conference (but they didn’t play anyone noteworthy until Missouri).

The Rose Bowl got it wrong too. It has traditionally been a Pac-10 versus Big Ten game, but in the ten years of the BCS, it has occasionally had to endure a team not from those conferences. They picked red-hot Pac-10 champ #7 USC to play not the team who was #1 just last week - Missouri - or either of the next highest-ranked teams (including #12 Florida and likely Heisman winner Tim Tebow), but #13 Illinois to preserve their precious tradition. Who made that decision, a bunch of 85-year-olds!? Sure, Illinois finished second in the Big Ten with wins over then-#1 Ohio State and then-#5 Wisconsin, but they actually lost to Missouri in the season opener. They’re not a bad choice - just not the right choice.

I’m not really sure why Missouri got screwed like it did. Just last week they were #1 and playing for a spot in the national championship game. Now, they don’t even get a BCS game. It’s not like they’re in a small or weak conference, which makes Kansas’s spot in the Orange Bowl all the more confusing (again, especially because of their win over Kansas). In my opinion, it’s all just another step toward a playoff system. A bracket of 16 teams including the same six conference champs plus maybe the rest of the top 12 and a few other teams, like maybe smaller conference champs and the Div I-AA champ? (Yes, there would surely be controversy in the selection of some of those lower teams, but better at that level than at the national championship game.) The top 15 bowls would get the bracket games and rotate around in some way to keep everyone happy. The other 800 bowl games out there could still exist, but just not participate in the bracket. Or maybe they could form the equivalent of college basketball’s NIT tournament, a sort of second-tier bracket? Or a 32-team bracket (requiring 31 of the current 32 bowls), which would be a five-weekend tournament and, if started the week after conference championship games, would end about the same time as the bowls currently end. Too many total weeks? Better for those NFL-bound players. College football, you can use these ideas, but I’d like credit.