Andy Staples has a column on the SI.com homepage right now bringing to light serious suspicions around the legitimacy of the BCS. On Monday night, the BCS sent out a release revising its rankings. Jerry Palm, the proprietor of CollegeBCS.com, had spotted an error in Wes Colley's computer rankings. He failed to include the score of the Western Illinois-Appalachian State FCS playoff game in his data set. That omission distorted the BCS rankings. LSU and Boise State were swapped at No. 10 and No. 11, and Alabama and Nebraska were swapped at No. 17 and No. 18. Luckily this didn't cause a problem for who played in the National Championship game, however, Staples points out that there could be other mistakes that no one knows about.
Staples writes, ‘"We don't know if Colley's mistake was the only one. Of the six computer rankings the BCS uses, Colley's is the only one available to the public -- or to the conferences that run the BCS. The other five could be riddled with mistakes, and the entity tasked with creating the No. 1 vs. No. 2 matchup would never know it."
Palm adds, "The bigger point is that nobody checks the BCS computer data...We should all be grateful to Colley for having a system that is open, accountable and verifiable. The BCS owes us an entire system that is open, accountable and verifiable."
The computer rankings are included in the BCS to counterbalance human biases but it takes a human to enter this data correctly, so one has to wonder if this has happened in the past to ensure a team a trip to a BCS bowl game based on which school would bring in larger ticket sales.
This is why I'm not watching college football after Dec. 21.