Playoffs, you kidding me?

Now that the college bowl match-ups are set, some people are looking past this year to next year when we throw out the BCS and welcome the long-awaited college football playoffs. Except, like most things the NCAA creates these days, it's an imperfect solution. The plan coming next season still won't resolve lingering issues created by the BCS and that's because the playoff (wink, wink) is merely the BCS with a fake mustache on.

The playoff format pits the top four ranked teams against one another in semi-final match-ups, with the winners of those two games playing for the championship. That seems fair enough until you realize the BCS standings make no sense. They never have and that isn't going to change in the future. Consider the most recent BCS standings and how that shapes up for a theoretical playoff. Michigan State and Florida State would play, with the winner playing for the title against the winner of the Auburn/Alabama game. Mmm, enticing match-up.

Except, what the hell is Alabama doing in the equation? Auburn, Florida State and Michigan State are all conference champions. Alabama isn't, by virtue of their absence in the SEC championship game, one of the top two teams in the SEC. Stanford, another conference champion, meanwhile, is ranked fifth and would not be part of the playoff picture. Seems legit. Three conference champions and a third place team in the playoffs while another conference champion goes to the Salad Bowl or the Cereal Bowl or whatever. But Stanford probably couldn't beat Alabama anyway. I mean, forget the fact Stanford's strength is the very thing that helped Auburn beat Alabama.

And that's just the point. Winning a conference championship seems to count for very little in the rankings. Five of the seven computer polls have Stanford ranked fourth or better. It's the two human polls that cause Stanford's demise–and there's plenty of evidence that humans and polls mixed together often produce horrendous results.

Let's forget, for a second, that Alabama not only didn't win a title, they didn't win (or even play in) a game and improved their position in the polls. I'd be a billionaire by now if you could improve your standing by doing nothing. South Carolina, meanwhile, beat a top-ranked team–convincingly, I might add–and went down in the rankings. The Gamecocks won as many SEC banners as Alabama did this season, played a game last week (unlike the Tide), won it and went down in the rankings. As my pal Jim Mora would say, you kidding me? Playoffs? More comically than that, Clemson, the team South Carolina beat in that final game improved in the rankings after their loss. Winning makes you go down, losing makes you go up and not playing is the best thing of all. Funny, I don't remember going through a looking glass.

And that's not the only screwy thing happening with teams named "USC." The one in Southern California is the weirdest of all. USC–the Trojans one, not the Gamecocks one–was previously unranked in the BCS standings. Last week, they lost 35-14 to UCLA, they hired a new coach, had their interim coach quit in disgust, leaving USC with yet another interim coach to finish the season AND YET broke into the BCS rankings for the first time all year. Now that's a Trojan horse maneuver if ever there was one.

So go ahead. Be giddy for the playoffs. But just know, as a college football fan, you'll probably still be befuddled because the new playoffs will be as senseless as the BCS until such time as the BCS rankings make any logical sense at all. Ha–winning is losing and losing is winning! What is this anyway? Wall Street banking?