No longer able to root for Rutgers,

I find myself supremely uninterested in the various debates over the BCS Championship game, and whether or not Michigan should be allowed to rematch. There's a little bit of me that's rooting for Arkansas, but the rest of me is bored by most of the rest of it all.

In the absence of a playoff system, the problem with college football is that there aren't enough matchups among the best teams of each conference. Put in network terms, the college football schedule is marked by a high degree of clustering (densely interlinked opponents in-conference) with minimal connections across clusters, and often those are too indirect to be used as evidence. Without a higher degree of connections among (rather than within) conferences, claims regarding the best or 2nd best teams in the country are nothing more than educated guesses.

And so, I don't know if Michigan, Florida, USC, Notre Dame, or Arkansas is genuinely the 2nd best team, or even really if Ohio State is the best. What allows us to genuinely compare the quality of these various clusters are the bowl games themselves, and the BCS in particular. When West Virginia clubbed Georgia last year, it injected some doubt into the "SEC rules, Big East drools" narrative that we suffered through all last year when VaTech, Miami, and BC bolted.

And so, I'm actively uninterested in watching a replay of a game that I'd just as soon see both teams lose (too many years of watching them clobber my Hawks--sorry). I'm more interested in seeing these two teams meet the best teams from the SEC and the Pac-10, so that we can see who the best conferences are, and who the best teams are.

Mostly, I'm interested in seeing it decided on the field (as OSU-Michigan already has been, in my mind), rather than in the hearts and minds of a whole bunch of sports information directors whose inertia keeps the same old teams at the top year after year, and makes it unnecessarily difficult for teams like Auburn, Utah, Arkansas, and others to break through when they deserve it.

That's all I got today. Happy thanksgiving, all.