With a week left in the college football season, the Bowl Championship Series, the system instituted eight years ago to ensure that the two best teams in the country face off for the national title, is facing the biggest mess in its short history.
Three one-loss teams, Florida, Michigan and USC, are legitimate contenders for the second spot in the BCS title game opposite undefeated consensus No. 1 Ohio State.
And that's the problem. No matter who gets the spot there will be bitter grousing over why it didn't go to either of the others.
The effect will be two-fold. The controversy will fuel sports talk radio for the next six weeks. That in itself is not such a bad thing. But it will all but ensure that the final BCS game airing on Fox will be low rated, perhaps reaching an all-time low.
Just why is not hard to figure out. Fans want to see a national championship game that pits the two undisputed top teams against each other. They do not want to see a contender who scraped into the game by virtue of a few tenths of a point in the convoluted BCS scoring system. It's bad enough when there's two teams contending for the second spot. This year's three confounds the problem exponentially.
For sure, all three teams have legitimate arguments as to why they should make it. Unfortunately, none outweighs the other.
Michigan’s only loss was a close one to Ohio State just a week ago in the highest-rated regular-season college football game in more than a decade. Yet many question whether it deserves a rematch.
Florida, which has perhaps the toughest schedule playing in the loaded SEC, fell to a strong Auburn team last month but has quality wins over Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama.
And USC, which has played in the national title game the last two years, lost to Oregon State by two points a month ago, but Saturday slaughtered No. 6 Notre Dame by 20 points.
USC and Florida each still have one game remaining, meaning they could well lose and Michigan would become the top choice by default. But that seems unlikely to happen.
Last year's final BCS game was an ideal matchup of two undefeated teams, and ratings reflected that: USC and Texas squared off in an exciting game that had been anticipated for months and more than 35 million total viewers watched, the most for a title game since Nielsen began tracking them in 1991.
By contrast, the previous two years were rife with controversy over which one-loss team should go on to play in the big game, and viewership averaged 22.7 million.
In 2003, when undefeated Miami and undefeated OSU squared off, it averaged 29.1 million.
The BCS pairings will be announced this Sunday on Fox, which is carrying the BCS series for the first time after taking over the series from ABC, which retains rights to the Rose Bowl.
Meanwhile, elsewhere in sports ratings for the week ended Nov. 12, Fox’s NFL coverage was the No. 1 show of the week with a 13.6 household rating. NBC’s “Sunday Night Football” was No. 2 with a 12.4.
College or pro football filled four of the top five spots and seven of the top nine.
