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" If there really has to be a national champion at the top level of college football, then it probably should be Crazee Bob Rubin&amp;#039;s House of Bailouts, which sponsored last night&amp;#039;s BCS title game between Alabama and Texas, as you could tell by the fact that Brent Musberger said &amp;quot;Citi&amp;quot; every 29.6 seconds for nearly four hours. At least the various corporate lycanthropes were happier last night than was Nick Saban, the bristling bundle of ill will who coached Alabama to a 37-21 victory over Texas, and who managed to be the least likable winner since the last time Rudy Giuliani got elected to anything. I mean, honestly, the players do the Gatorade thing at the end, and Saban looks as though someone had disemboweled his puppy. There wasn&amp;#039;t much to the game, actually. Coming in, it featured both Heisman Trophy winner Mark Ingram of Alabama and Texas quarterback Colt McCoy, who was the runner-up for the stiff-arming andiron. This promising subplot lasted five whole plays, at which point first-year lineman Marcell Dareus lined up McCoy and shattered the quarterback&amp;#039;s right shoulder. That left the Longhorns with, as they say, Untried Freshman Garrett Gilbert, who performed pretty much the way Untried Freshmen perform when you toss them into the first quarter of the national championship game with little or no warning. Obviously emboldened by this good fortune, Alabama responded by ripping a couple hundred pages out of the playbook, and taking the national television audience on a thrilling ride back to the play-calling of the 1950s. Things got even more tedious when Ingram, for whom the excellent Texas defense never found an answer, missed a huge chunk of the second half with what seemed to be the Mother of All Leg Cramps. Gilbert finally got his feet under him and threw a pair of touchdown passes to Jordan Shipley, the second of which, with 6:15 left in the game, actually got the Longhorns to within 24-21. Unfortunately for him, on the next possession, Alabama linebacker Eryk Anders came steaming in off the left edge, freight-trained Gilbert right into his sophomore season, and forced a fumble on the Texas two-yard line. Ingram banged in from there for 31-21 and then, when Gilbert threw an interception late, that merry gadabout Saban concocted an utterly gratuitous touchdown for the final margin. Alabama had won the national championship with 263 yards of total offense. Ingram accounted for 128 of them. The BCS \u2014 and bowl season generally \u2014 is a festival of corporate excess. That much is plain from the logos of the various games, one of which is sponsored not by a chain of pizza joints but by the Web site for a chain of pizza joints. The bigger the corporate brigand, the bigger the game it gets. This bothers much of the sporty punditocracy rather less than the fact that there is no playoff system to determine the champion on the field. This is often couched in the pundit&amp;#039;s concern for The Kids, and not for said pundit&amp;#039;s desire to have another week of corporate buffet-grazing on what has become an endless calendar of Big Events. If you&amp;#039;re really concerned about The Kids, argue that they ought to be paid for their work, not that they ought to provide another two weeks of dangerous cheap labor for the mass-entertainment industry. If nothing else, the championship game presented a number of very good arguments in favor of the bowl system and against the idea of a playoff &amp;quot;tournament,&amp;quot; most of which center on the fact that playing only one postseason game is immeasurably better than playing two or three of them. (And people who argue that we would only see an eight- or 16-team playoff are fools or charlatans. Any field would double to 16 or 32 teams within five years. Hell, I remember when the NCAA basketball tournament was only 16 teams.) And, were I a fan of any of these teams, I&amp;#039;d much rather watch my 9-3 team win, say, the Holiday Bowl championship than the Chick-Fil-A Southeast Regional Quarterfinal. Beyond that, let us take as a given that, the fewer football games a football player plays, the more healthy he is. This need not necessarily be a concern in the NFL, although it ought to be a bigger one than it is. In college, why should Colt McCoy get two or three additional chances to get his shoulder mashed, thereby costing himself a couple of million dollars whenever he&amp;#039;s drafted? Tell me again how it&amp;#039;s really for The Kids. Playoff football is cautious football. In fact, playoff anything is cautious anything. (The only sport that aesthetically profits from this is hockey, where the NHL annually gives us a spate of drum-tight 2-1 double-overtime Stanley Cup playoff games). Because, under the present system, every postseason game except for the last one is contested only for bragging rights, and because winning is more fun than losing, coaches tend to play wide-open, relaxed football. Put them in a tournament, and you&amp;#039;re not going to be able to pull pins out of their asses with a tractor. That said, neither Saban nor Texas coach Mack Brown particularly distinguished themselves last night. Prior to folding his team into an offensive shell, Saban enlivened the early going with a lunatic fake punt on a fourth-and-23. (One of the weirdest football dynamics right now has its roots in Bill Belichick&amp;#039;s going for a fourth-and-two deep in his own end against the Indianapolis Colts earlier this season. The play failed, the Colts won, and Belichick got excoriated for thumbing his nose at conventional wisdom. Then, some figure filberts sprang up, arguing that everything everyone knows is wrong, mathematically, and that going for it is the percentage play. Coaches thereupon lost their minds. Saban is part of the single-brained Belichick coaching organism, so last night&amp;#039;s gamble was probably no surprise.) Meanwhile, rather than letting his rookie quarterback milk the clock at the end of the first half, Brown sent in a baffling inside shovel pass that Dareus picked off in midair, rumbling in for a touchdown that sent Alabama into halftime with a 24-6 lead. There&amp;#039;s another, contradictory argument against a playoff. Give coaches two or three extra chances to screw up, and there&amp;#039;s no telling what idiocy we might see. RELATED LINKS:  FROM THE ARCHIVE: Pierce on the Most Hated Coach in College Football  EARLIER: Pierce on the Tiger Woods Scandal   PETE CARROLL: Behind the Scenes with USC Coach Targeted by NFL   "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a6890/bcs-vs-playoff-system-010810/>