When Kentucky football fans rushed the field after beating Louisiana State, when Stanford became a national story after topping Southern California, when Colorado had its banner win against Oklahoma, the story became parity. And it was generally seen as good.

That’s because parity is fun. It makes Saturday more exciting and reaffirms the cliched notion that anyone can beat anyone.

But good? It’s not good for college football, at least under college football’s current structure.

The much-reviled Bowl Championship Series, which places the responsibility with a mathematical formula to figure out who should play for college football’s national championship, is designed to pit the supposed two best teams in the nation against each other. This is much easier when we know USC should play Texas, like the great 2006 game. This works when Miami and Ohio State seemed destined to play each other, like in 2002, or Florida State and Virginia Tech square off, as happened in 1999.

But parity isn’t good when we look at the BCS standings today and see Ohio State No. 1 and Boston College No. 2, yet that might simply be because they didn’t play LSU’s schedule or had a hiccup – or better said, a broken finger to its starting quarterback -like USC. This is not to make any excuses for teams that lost, but it’s to acknowledge the problem with parity, which arrives when the tough lesson comes to the teams that aren’t supposed to lose.

The BCS isn’t going anywhere, at least not any time soon. There have been modifications and additions, but this system is under contract and will remain so at least until the 2010 bowl season. So that’s not even worth arguing. What is worth arguing is whether this trend of upsets is helping or hurting a game devoid of a tournament, instead counting on a championship game determined by polls.

‘This trend is here to stay,’ West Virginia head coach Rich Rodriguez said Monday. ‘The days of one or two teams dominating like they were in the past, I’m not sure that’s going to be the case anymore.’

The problem is the BCS was designed to pit those two dominant teams against each other. When those teams aren’t there – or not as clear – it results with a free-for-all for a handful of teams.

Parity is great in college basketball, when George Mason can beat Connecticut in the Elite Eight and reach the Final Four. It’s great with a 30-game season and 65-team tournament, when Cinderella stories sell.

But not in college football. College football is about Goliath. Tulane ran the table in 1998, Marshall in 1999, Utah in 2004 and Boise State last season. None will enter discussions about the best college football team in the past decade. The teams that do are the giants of the sport – the great Miami teams earlier this decade and the USC and Texas teams of recent history.

Confusion at the top of the BCS standings because the best teams have one loss isn’t a new thing. In 2003-04, one-loss USC was ranked No. 1 in both The Associated Press and coaches’ poll yet didn’t play for the national championship because LSU and Oklahoma were higher in the BCS standings. Nebraska reached the BCS championship game in 2001-02 with one loss over Colorado, which also had only one loss.

This year, the controversy might come because of an undefeated team in a weak conference. The two best conferences are clearly the Southeastern Conference and Pac-10. This is because of a concentration of good teams, which results in even the best teams losing. The SEC has no unbeaten teams. The Pac-10 has just one undefeated team remaining – Arizona State, which has three games remaining against top 25 teams including USC and Oregon.

Ohio State received 57 votes for No. 1 in The Associated Press poll this week, although none of their eight wins are against teams currently ranked in the Top 25. They have two games against teams with such a distinction – No. 25 Penn State and No. 20 Michigan.

If Boston College finishes unbeaten, it will be an accomplishment, although one achieved by beating just one team currently ranked in the top 25. An unbeaten Kansas would also have just one win against a team in the top 25.

Now this doesn’t include conference championship games or teams that might finish strong, which would help the causes of both BC and Kansas. But it does open the question of what will happen if LSU and USC or Oregon finish the season with just one loss.

If it’s LSU, that will be an 11-1 record against six teams in the top 25, not even including a conference championship game. If it’s Oregon, it will be against four teams currently in the top 25. If it’s USC, it will be against three teams in top 25.

This shouldn’t discount the accomplishment of a team finishing unbeaten. But last year’s national championship game when one-loss Florida destroyed unbeaten Ohio State was an indication that the loss column isn’t always indicative of the better team. This is where parity comes back in.

LSU lost to Kentucky, which lost to Florida, which lost to LSU. Parity has created an environment where the two best teams aren’t always the ones undefeated after Thanksgiving.

As long as the BCS is determining who should win the national championship, this is not a good thing.

Zach Berman is the sports columnist for The Daily Orange, where his columns appear every Wednesday and select days throughout the semester. He can be reached at zberman@syr.edu.

Published on October 23, 2007 at 12:00 pm