It's halftime of the Rose Bowl, and Miami is absolutely kicking the holy crap out of Nebraska. UW put up more of a fight in the first half of that game they lost at Miami 65-7.

Coming in, I was definitely pulling for Nebraska, because if they won it meant a shared Nat'l. Title with Oregon. I hate the emphasis on a "National Championship" in D1-A college football because there never really has been one. The BCS is just some method to try to justify the cowning of an official champion, by having an alleged "title game." However, simply having a "title game" doesn't mean you have a National Champ. It's just so STUPID! The Championship is no less mythical now than it was before the BCS crap came around.

Part of what bugs me so much about the whole thing is that it de-emphasizes the tradition the bowls were based on. And yes, the "tradition" is what made them important. "Tradition" is probably more important to major college football than any other major sport -- baseball comes in a close second. There used to be a "tradition" about the whole thing. The major football conferences had major bowl games that their regular season champs would play in. The PAC-10 and Big 10 champs would face off in the Rose Bowl (a traditional criminally broken this year that had existed since 1946!). The SEC champs to the Sugar Bowl, the Big-8 (now Big-12) champs to the Orange Bowl, and the now-defunct SWC to the Cotton (the old SWC broke up, most of it's member schools heading to the SEC or Big-8 come Big-12, this Greatly reduced the importance of the Cotton Bowl). The ACC and Big East have recently been added to the "major" conferences list, but neither had much credibility before Miami joined the Bid East and Florida State the ACC. The emphasis of the season was win your conference, and win your conference's bowl game. The "Nat'l Champ" was sort of a mythical thing, sort of a post-season award based on sportswriter and coaches voting.

But then too much importance was placed on the National Championship, and people started clammoring for a way to solve this alleged "problem." after about 10 years of fidgeting and bickering, this "system" was put into place to determine a "national champion," except it's started as many problems as it was supposed to solve. I really like the BCS rankings as a way to rank teams, and they could use it to make sure deserving teams get put into the open spots in the major bowls, but D1-A College Football just needs to get an actual playoff (seedings determined by the BCS formula) or just go back to the old, "traditional" bowl system. This bastardization serves no-one.

Anyway, Nebraska is losing HARD, and costing the Ducks a probable share of the "title," which I would have love to have seen (go PAC-10!). But I've never been a Nebraska fan. In fact, I've got sick and tired of Nebraska with their boring -- that's right, I called it BORING -- option offense and their treatment of the forward pass as still some kind of novelty. Don't get me wrong, I hate Miami, for obvious reasons, but at least they're FUN TO WATCH. Now that Nebraska is getting creamed, I'm more at ease, because I don't have to root for a team I don't really like and can just watch with a sort of entertained ambivalence.