Barring a miracle, the Big Ten champion will be playing in the Rose Bowl this January. The conference has been out of the national title picture since Ohio State tripped up against Wisconsin on October 16.
Never mind that the Buckeyes are still among the nation's leaders in scoring average, offense and defense, or that their loss came against another one-loss team.
The single blemish essentially ended their hopes with almost half the season remaining.
The BCS eliminates teams with a single loss from the title chase almost by design (unless they play in that bastion of football, the SEC). Calls for a playoff have been rampant — even reaching Capitol Hill — and now Utah's attorney general is meeting with the Justice Department about possible antitrust violations.
The atmosphere has been ripe for the definitive book against the system, and that is what three writers from Yahoo! attempt to deliver in Death to the BCS: The Definitive Case Against the Bowl Championship Series.
Since Dan Wetzel, Josh Peter and Jeff Passan hail from the home of the BALCO leak and the Reggie Bush scandal, it seemed the perfect group to behead the hated Cartel, as the heads of the major football conferences are referred to.
While the book succeeds in highlighting the many issues with the BCS and the bowl system, it fails in its other stated purpose. It does not deliver a playoff system with the appropriate amount of detail and air-tight financials, the same thing the authors expect from the computers, poll voters, and BCS in general.
From revelations about how bowl payouts work to how most athletic programs lose money by attending the smaller bowls (even after conference assistance), Wetzel and crew have compiled enough data to make a CPA blush.
If the devil is in the details, then the authors have found it. They just chose not to share it with the readers.
Death to the BCS has exactly one illustration, an expense report detailing a Virginia Tech bowl trip and how they managed to lose money on a more than $1 million payout.
With all the documents assembled to pull the book together, you would think they could share more than one of them. The rest of the data has to be taken on face value.
If printing these in the hard-bound book was too expensive, they could have included them on the book's website (a practice that in the Internet age would seem to be a no-brainer, especially for three sportswriters who work for Yahoo!), but again, nothing.
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