Which, of course, is the way it always has been and always should be.

		Monday, Aug. 16 I still don't like the Bowl Championship Series. I think it's admirable what they're trying to do, but I still favor a championship series in which a team can lose early or lose a game or two like basketball and can come back later and be part of a 16-team playoff in the end. I coached in Division I-AA, and I thought the playoff system worked in I-AA. It works in Division II, it works in Division III, and it will work in I-A. You have to use the bowls. I'm for the bowls being a part of the playoff. Whatever bowls aren't a part of it could be like the NIT in basketball. I think football is the only sport in college that they schedule open dates before tough games. And if you lose early, you are done. For instance, if Michigan loses to Notre Dame, for most practical purposes, the Wolverines are out of the title picture. I don't think that's right. At the end of the year, you could be the best team and still not get a chance to prove it. Ohio State was a perfect example last year. There's a valid argument that the Buckeyes shouldn't have lost, but I still would have liked to have seen them play Tennessee or Florida State.

You remember the first year of the BCS. The NCAA's all-seeing, all-knowing computer that would provide us with a national champion was such a steamingly unpopular idea that it fueled us all through dead week after deader week. As a tool for decision-making, it was an unmitigated disaster. As a way to perpetuate the best part of the status quo, it couldn't have been more effective.

Because, as even you college football freaks will acknowledge, there's a long time between games, and the other 165 hours of the week are meant for elevating your team, denigrating anyone else's team, and shouting over huge hogsheads of microbrew why these two philosophies run in harmony with life itself.

In short, college football is about young men running into each other at frightful speeds once a week and fighting for the right to argue about their relative merits the rest of the time. And there's nothing wrong with that.

The BCS, of course, was designed to eliminate all of this by interposing science into the discussion, and emitting one worthy competitor and 113 lapdogs, sluggards and ottomans for the mighty. The BCS, in other words, was going to quantify in binary language the sentence, "My team rules and yours sucks."

The BCS also was going to reconcile that you can find a national champion on the field without breaking the interlocking ever-growing web of bowl games, which have been one of the principal spines of the industry since people first realized you could glue flowers onto cars and turn them into huge murals that thinned the ozone layer and frightened small children.

For instance, UCLA has beaten USC eight consecutive times, but try to get a USC fan to admit that the Bruins are great, and his team is bait. You can't do it, and shouldn't even try.

But never mind that. The BCS also was going to find an accommodation between those who have demanded a national championship tournament (football coaches, sportswriters, broadcasters and associated blowhards) and those who prefer and defend the bowl system (athletic directors, bowl committee and associated blowhards).

	Kansas State coach Bill Snyder found out the BCS was less than perfect in its inaugural season.

That failed too, and for an equally good reason, namely that these two sets of blowhards should never be in agreement on anything. They are adversaries, and should be because that, too, makes the system work. Athletic directors know (when they're not out shaking down rich people for money) that they're smarter than coaches and media types. Media types know (when they're not compiling lists of likely coaching vacancies and obvious replacements) that they are more virtuous than athletic directors.

And coaches? They make the most money and are sure that they know more than anyone else on earth. They happily would pool their resources if they could stick all the ADs and medioids on an immense barge and steer it toward the nearest tropical storm. Thinning out the herd, coaches would call it.

These three groups were not meant to enjoy the same space in harmony, and since most successful coaches long ago ate their athletic directors, all that's really left for them are street agents (who they have to mollify) and the media (who they hold at arm's length and malign at every turn). That one's a fair fight, because eventually, all coaches get fired (or ascend directly into heaven, in a few cases), but there's always the media.

Point is, they should be arguing just as much as the various alumni, because argument is good in this case. Argument is fun, as long as you leave your pointy sticks at the door.

Ultimately, this is why the BCS is doomed to fail -- it attempts to crown a king in a nation of anarchists. It is irrelevant to the true nature of the sport it is attempting to explain to us. This isn't about progressives and Luddites. This is about the benign animosity of collegiate rivalry that burns for all eternity, broken up by the occasional game.

Plus, you can bet on it. Try that at your next international relations symposium.

Ray Ratto of the San Francisco Examiner is a regular contributor to ESPN.com.