Column: BCS mess strikes TCU, Boise State

It’s difficult not to feel sorry for Coach Gary Patterson and the Horned Frogs of Texas Christian. Over the past season, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more impressive college football team than TCU.

Last November, the Horned Frogs lost, 13-10, on a last-minute touchdown to Utah --— the same Utah team that shellacked Alabama, this year’s near-consensus No. 1 squad, 31-17, in the Sugar Bowl this past January. The loss also cost TCU a potential shot to compete in a BCS bowl.

Since then, Patterson’s team has been on an absolute tear. The Horned Frogs have won 14 straight games, with 10 of those wins coming by 25 points or more. This year, TCU finished fourth in the nation in total offense and first in total defense. Can you name the last time a team finished in the top five in both those categories in the BCS era? Trick question: It’s never happened before.

One guy who definitely feels Patterson’s pain is Boise State coach Chris Peterson. All Peterson’s team has done in the past two years is go 25-1. The Broncos’ lone loss in the past two seasons was against — you guessed it — TCU, by a score of 17-16 in last year’s Poinsettia Bowl.

Boise State has defeated Oregon, the reigning Pac-10 champion, twice in its impressive stretch. The Broncos currently boast the nation’s highest-scoring offense and are led by quarterback Kellen Moore, college football’s top-rated passer.

For their efforts, TCU and Boise State earned a rematch in the Fiesta Bowl on Jan. 4. The game will mark the first time that two non-BCS schools have played each other in one of college football’s major bowl games since the system’s creation. Ask BCS executive director Bill Hancock, and he’d probably tell you that the game is a sign of how much fairer the BCS has become in its treatment of smaller-conference schools. But in the words of the great John McEnroe, “You cannot be serious.”

The upcoming Fiesta Bowl amounts to a college football version of the No Child Left Behind Act. In what many fans have dubbed the “Children’s Table Bowl,” Boise State and TCU will face off in a game that will inevitably leave more questions than answers.

This was supposed to be the year that we found out how good the non-BCS conference teams really were. Instead, the Broncos and the Horned Frogs were tucked away to a corner in the Arizona desert where they will play for yet another championship ring-free undefeated season.

To call the fact that neither TCU nor Boise State received a game against a BCS-conference school a disgrace is generous. This year’s Fiesta Bowl is as close to class discrimination as you can come in college football.

Here’s what should have happened: Instead of a Sugar Bowl between undefeated Cincinnati and Tim Tebow-led Florida, those two teams should have split up and played the Broncos and Horned Frogs. A TCU-Florida Sugar Bowl and a Cincinnati-Boise State Fiesta Bowl sounds way more appealing than the mess the BCS churned out this season.

I’m not arguing that either TCU or Boise State deserved a shot at the national championship over an undefeated Alabama or Texas team. Given the current system, if you run the table in a major conference, you should have a shot to play for a national title. But both teams deserve a chance to prove themselves against a major conference opponent instead of being left with the babysitter while the BCS schools went to the ball.

Maybe TCU and Boise State would have lost to Florida and Cincinnati. If this had happened, at least we’d have had a verdict on how good the non-BCS teams actually were this season.

Get the best of the ‘Prince’ delivered straight to your inbox. Subscribe now »

Why didn’t the major bowls endorse such an attractive possibility? Probably because Hancock and the BCS are scared of the outcome. In the last three seasons, non-BCS schools have taken more wins in major bowl games (two) than the ACC (one) and Big 10 (zero) combined.

If TCU and Boise State defeated Florida and Cincinnati in the same season, it would only raise support for a college football playoff. But that would be too much to ask. What we’ve been left with is a system that will crown an undefeated national championship team while either Peterson’s or Patterson’s team is once again stuck on the outside, looking in.

You could make a real case for TCU being the best team in the country this year. They have the fourth-highest-rated quarterback in Andy Dalton, the most-feared defense end in Jerry Hughes and All-America candidates at linebacker, center and punt returner.

But, sadly, we’ll never know how good TCU, or Boise State for that matter, really is this season. And that’s the real problem.