We’re on record defending the Bowl Championship Series, probably because we’ve read too much Slate and went into a David Plotz-ian contrarian frenzy. Or maybe Jack Shafer would be more appropriate. Whatever. Anyway, like Warren Zevon sang, “I appreciate the best, but I’m settling for less, so I’m looking for the next best thing.” The BCS is the next best thing. Remember college football before the BCS? And before the zombie precursor to the BCS? REMEMBER THE UPI POLL? Shit was crazy. But, it seems we’ve found the perfect compromise.

Enter the Stick Jockey at gaming blog Kotaku. Not only did they come up with a brilliant idea for a 16-team playoff, it was done with the bowl system intact. The idea is rather lengthy and involved, but it can be boiled down to a manageable level.

First, you start off with the champions of each of the FBS conferences. Win your conference, get in the playoff. Not bad, when you’re Troy. Instant shot, albeit a long one for some teams, to win the national championship. It’s the ultimate leveling of the playing field. Then, there’s at-large teams, picked in much a way as the NCAA basketball tournament. LSU gets in. As a result, the SEC is the only conference with three teams in the bunch (joining Alabama and Florida). Some jagoff in Los Angeles or New York City gets their panties in a wad about it. Yay, the new drama-free college football postseason! It’s valid, though, because it maintains the importance of the regular season. LSU beats in Penn State because the Tigers played, and beat, tougher teams. Logic prevails.

Super-extra bonus: Some bowls can’t exist because a lack of teams. That means six bowls, including Birmingham’s Papajohns.com Bowl get the can. Being at the bottom sucks, bowl committeemen. There are still 27 bowls, which are way, way more than enough for everybody not in the playoffs. Sure, the big bowls are still there, and they may bitch about not getting better teams (Ole Miss ends up in the Sugar Bowl), but the bowl is still viable as a stand-alone entity (instead of being included in a playoff scenario) and the trip from Oxford to New Orleans isn’t that far.

The games are all simulated in NCAA Football 2010. The playoff games are at the stadium of the higher-seeded team, except for the championship game, which is in San Diego, because it’s warm and none of the larger bowls are run out of Qualcomm Stadium.

Carolina loses. But you knew that already.

at Memphis, Tenn.
Liberty Bowl:
Houston (Conference USA, 10-3) vs. South Carolina (SEC, 7-5)
South Carolina’s defense gets Houston down 17-0 early, but Case Keenum and the high-powered Cougars come storming back for a 45-34 win that isn’t that close. Keenum tosses five touchdowns, two to Tyron Carrier, who also has 175 yards.

Clemson wins.

at Miami
Orange Bowl:
Clemson (ACC, 8-5) vs. No. 20 Nebraska (Big XII, 9-4)
By virtue of its tie-in with the ACC, the Orange has been the de facto Kids’ Table of the BCS for much of this decade, including a Wake Forest-Louisville matchup in 2007 that should have been broadcast by Raycom. But here the Orange returns to its old Big Eight roots to invite Nebraska, pairing the Cornhuskers with Clemson in a matchup recalling 1982, Tom Osborne and Danny Ford, and the Tigers’ only national championship.

Clemson’s C.J. Spiller starts the game with an Orange Bowl record 82-yard run from scrimmage for a touchdown as the Tigers sprint to a 21-7 lead by the half. Nebraska rallies to a 28-28 tie, then goes for it on 4th and 1 from their own 35 with 6 minutes left in the fourth – and fumbles. Spiller’s ensuing 7-yard touchdown grab out of the backfield from Kyle Parker provides the final margin, 35-28.

The playoffs turn out thusly:

First Round
(16) Troy 27, (1) Alabama 52
(15) East Carolina 0, (2) Texas 52
(14) Central Michigan 24, (3) Cincinnati 45
(13) LSU 52, (4) TCU 55
(12) BYU 41, (5) Boise State 39
(11) Iowa 15, (6) Oregon 41
(10) Virginia Tech 27, (7) Ohio State 29
(9) Florida 43, (8) Georgia Tech 3

Second Round
(12) BYU 21, (4) TCU 24
(9) Florida 34, (1) Alabama 35
(7) Ohio State 17, (2) Texas 45
(6) Oregon 27, (3) Cincinnati 24

Semifinals
(4) TCU 17, (1) Alabama 30
(6) Oregon 31, (2) Texas 24

National Championship
(6) Oregon 35, (1) Alabama 23

Wait, did we say this was a great idea? No, no, no. This idea is total bullshit. Bama didn’t go all that way to lose to some garishly-dressed Ducks from Nike U. In all seriousness, though, while half the nation is spitballing ideas on how to improve the system, this one looks the best.

One of the under reported stories every year in major college football is the amount of free crap football players get when they go to a bowl game. Some is useless. For instance, we got a free watch from the SEC and a free pin for covering the 2004 SEC Men’s Basketball Tournament. Frankly, the catered Georgia Dome food, free bags of Golden Flake and Dr. Pepper out the wazzou was better than what the conference gave sportswriters.

The following is what SEC teams will be getting this year.

Music City Bowl
Kentucky: RCA high-def camcorder, Fossil watch, Majestic fleece pullover, New Era cap, Ogio Metro laptop pack
Independence Bowl
Georgia: Sony gift suite, Timely Watch Co. watch, New Era cap, football
Chick-fil-A Bowl
Tennessee: $250 Best Buy gift card, Fossil watch, Russell Athletic knit cap, Russell Athletic travel bag, football, Chick-fil-A gift card
Outback Bowl
Auburn: Best Buy gift card, Pro-Swiss watch, Jostens ring, hat, Outback Steakhouse gift card
Capital One Bowl
LSU: Party at Best Buy ($420 limit), Timely Watch Co. watch
Sugar Bowl
Florida: Sony, Apple, Trek, Garmin and Weber gift suite, Timely Watch Co. watch, New Era cap, Ogio Politan laptop pack, Lane recliner
Papajohns.com Bowl
South Carolina: RCA high-def mini-camcorder, Oakley Surf Pack backpack
Cotton Bowl
Ole Miss: Unknown
Liberty Bowl
Arkansas: Westinghouse 19-inch LCD HDTV/computer monitor, Fossil watch, Nike training shoes/sport sandals/sunglasses, football
BCS National Championship Game
Alabama: Sony gift suite with Trek and Garmin, Fossil watch, New Era 59Fifty cap, Ogio Politan laptop pack

This past week was considered a boring one at the outset, but a few games created new story lines and teams that will be slotted into the SEC bowl tie-ins got a little of a shake. With Tennessee’s win, the conference now has 10 bowl eligible teams, and barring a strange turn, will be sending each of them to a bowl. Sorry, Mississippi State and Vanderbilt — your sub-.500 status locks in your teams as teh suxx0rs.

BCS National Championship Game
Alabama or Florida v. Texas
Sugar Bowl
Alabama or Florida v. Cincinnati
Capital One Bowl
Ole Miss v. Penn State
Outback Bowl
Tennessee v. Wisconsin
Cotton Bowl
LSU v. Nebraska
Chick-fil-A Bowl
Georgia v. Virginia Tech
Music City Bowl
Kentucky v. Miami
Liberty Bowl
Arkansas v. Houston
Independence Bowl
Auburn v. At-large
Papajohns.com Bowl
South Carolina v. South Florida

There are some others who are thinking that Carolina won’t be slotted in the last spot, with Georgia or Tennessee taking that place. It really is just conjecture, though. To a degree, records and tiebreakers don’t matter past the top teams. Bowl committees have their rules as a mishmash of one guy gets first choice of a team from the SEC West, or East, and if then, &c. You need a flowchart to follow that, alone. Then there’s considerations as far as geographics, ticket sales and TV ratings.

Also, you may have noticed “Auburn v. At-large.” Unless Kansas can upset Missouri, The Big XII will not have enough teams to fill its entire bowl slate, and the Independence Bowl brings up the rear. Under any other circumstance, a team would be available, but Kansas State, which has closed out the season at 6-6, doesn’t have enough qualifying wins to make it. Last season, neither the Big XII nor the SEC had enough teams, and Louisiana Tech played Northern Illinois in Shreveport.

That means a team with enough wins from one of the non-BCS conferences that is eligible will be taken. Right now, the Sun Belt is the first available alternate conference. Here’s some fun for Tiger fans — the two teams most likely to go are UL-U-Pick’em, that is UL-Lafayette and UL-Monroe. Imagine that, going to play a bowl game against a team you usually schedule as an early-season patsy. Believe it, Auburn fans. It’s in the cards.

Slagging the Bowl Championship Series these days is like being a fan of Nirvana in 1992. Rarely has trying to be a rebel looked so mainstream. Yeah, kid, you want a playoff. Woo. But, really, the bowl system and the BCS is pretty, pretty, pretty good for major college football.

Hey, we aren’t big fans of basketball or baseball, but it seems like a waste of a season to kick ass, do well and then get knocked out in the Sweet 16 or Elite Eight or whathaveyou. Oh, your team got to the Final Four last year? Did it win? No? Losers. Let’s say you, like us, are a fan of a team in the Top 8 of the BCS standings. If there was an eight-team playoff, or 16-team playoff, and Alabama lost before the championship game, the season would be a major disappointment. It would be on the level of, “The Tide went undefeated in the regular season for this bullshit?”

Sure, with a playoff, you’d have the rest of the bowl structure open to teams who didn’t make the field. But it truly would suck if a good team, seven or 15 of them, ended the season with a loss. College football fans have been brought up on the notion that if your team is good enough to make it to a bowl game, there is the possibility of ending the season with a win. The BCS keeps this in effect, while — though it isn’t perfect — coming up with a good way to have a No. 1 v. No. 2 national championship game.

OK. The BCS has its flaws. So does the goddamn Electoral College, but we’ve yet to scrap that in over 200 years.

Haven’t had enough bowl games? The NCAA is talking with New York Yankees general partner Hal Steinbrenner about installing an early-December bowl game in Yankee Stadium. In the event it went through at the proposed 2011 date, it would be the first postseason college football game played in New York City in 49 years.

While the NCAA is probably jazzed about the possibility of building off of Army’s scheduled games in the Bronx, there are a dwindling number of teams that reach the six-win threshold that don’t go to bowl games. Last year, only four teams that could have gone to bowl games did not.

But, let’s say the game was in effect last year. Would you have tuned in a week or two after the conference championship games to watch UL-Lafayette and San Jose State play in a bowl game? Moreover, who in the greater NYC environs would want to brave the cold temperatures to watch two mediocre college football teams play in a stadium designed for baseball?

If the 34 current bowl games were pared down to, say, 24, maybe somebody could find two halfway decent teams to square off. But, there’s still the problem of a paucity of viable FBS teams in the area. Consider: Rutgers, Buffalo, Syracuse, Army, Boston College. Maybe Notre Dame goes 6-6. But, there’s still issues with bowl tie-ins with the conferences.

Somebody stop the insanity.