By Eddie Pells
The Associated Press

The best team in the land? Nobody will know for sure this season.

What if the winner of the Rose Bowl could play the winner of the Sugar Bowl a week after those big games? Oklahoma vs. Southern California would be a dandy. So would LSU vs. USC. Of course, if Michigan slipped in with its two losses, some folks might be upset, though nobody could say the Wolverines went through the back door.

A one-game playoff is one of a handful of solutions that have floated around for years in an attempt to crown a true champion out of one of the most controversial, some say antiquated, concoctions in sports - the college bowl system.

"We have this conversation every year," Texas coach Mack Brown said. "Unless we change the system, we'll have this conversation every year."

The system that gives us No. 1 USC vs. No. 4 Michigan in the Rose Bowl and No. 2 LSU vs. No. 3 Oklahoma in the supposed title game, the Sugar Bowl, is in place for at least two more seasons.

Some tweaking is surely in order. But wholesale changes almost certainly aren't. In fact, while many vocal fans might be irate, at least one expert believes the key decision-makers - coaches, athletic directors, school presidents - probably will stick with something close to the status quo even when the current contract is up.

"The overwhelming majority want to keep the bowl system in some form," said Grant Teaff, executive director of the American Football Coaches Association. "Just like with the BCS, you're not going to serve every institution in every conference, even with a playoff system."

The most likely change in the contract would involve adding a championship game, or maybe two rounds of playoffs, after bowl season. It's a plan that has been debated quite often.

Oregon athletic director Bill Moos made the most serious push in 2001, after the Ducks got bypassed for the top bowl in favor of Nebraska, which had lost 62-36 to Colorado and didn't even play in the Big 12 title game.

The pros for a post-bowl playoff: A tournament-style ending would leave less room for debate. For instance, if Oklahoma and Southern Cal each won its bowl game, then played a week later, there would be little doubt about who the real champion was.

Cons: It adds an extra week of football, something school presidents aren't thrilled about. And would fans really pay to go to the Rose Bowl one week, then take another trip for the championship game the next?

A more radical change would be taking 16 top teams and throwing them into a big tournament, a la basketball's March Madness.

"There needs to be a big playoff," said Texas Tech's Mike Leach, a member of the minority of coaches who would like to see a tournament. "We would do away with putting all this foolishness into the computer and hoping somehow it is going to come up with the right thing."

Proponents of that idea say it makes more sense to decide a football title the same way as almost every other championship in major sports. No doubt, it wouldn't reward excellence in the regular season as much, but nobody disputes the legitimacy of an NCAA basketball champion that gets hot in March and wins it all.

Critics, however, claim a full-fledged playoff would gut the bowl system as we know it. And no matter how many teams reach the playoffs, there always will be a debate about the third- or ninth- or 17th-ranked team - the first one that gets left out.

Much of how this season will be remembered rides on Michigan, the only team in the Rose-Sugar pairings with more than one loss.

If Michigan can upset Southern Cal in the Rose Bowl, the winner of the Sugar Bowl will be crowned the champion in both The Associated Press and the coaches' polls because only one team will be left with one loss.

But if Southern Cal wins, there's a good chance of a split. Coaches don't even vote for the top team in their poll because of an agreement that automatically awards their trophy to the winner of the BCS title game. Voters in the AP poll do select a No. 1 team, however, and no team that went into a bowl ranked No. 1 and won ever fell out of that top spot.

"There is no infallible system," Teaff said.

A minor patch would be to exclude any team from the BCS that didn't win its conference.

It might have made sense the year Nebraska lost to Colorado, although it would be more tricky this year with Oklahoma. The Sooners have one loss, just like USC and LSU, only theirs came last week instead of earlier in the season.

"Being No. 1, we carried that burden for 12 games, and played quite well," Sooners coach Bob Stoops said.

Yet another possibility, although unlikely, would be to dismantle the BCS altogether and revert to the old-fashioned bowl system, then let poll voters determine champions at the end of the bowl season.

While that solution would promote the self-interested bowl system that is essentially responsible for the current problems, it would eliminate the BCS, whose framers have proven over the past several years that the harder they try to come up with a perfect solution, the clearer it is that none exists.

"I really don't have any answers," Gator Bowl director Rick Catlett said. "But it certainly is a mess right now."

The BCS evolution

How the Bowl Championship Series came to be:

•  Before 1992, bowls, except a handful that had specific tie-ins with conferences, were free to make their own deals. However, more and more of those deals were being struck as early as November, or about a month before the season was over. In the last 56 seasons, only eight times did this method create a matchup of the No. 1 and No. 2 teams.

•  A series of meetings in 1991 and 1992 developed into the Bowl Coalition. This was designed to create matchups of the Big East and Atlantic Coast Conference champs and Notre Dame and the champions of the Big Eight (Orange Bowl), Southeastern Conference (Sugar) or Southwest Conference (Cotton). If - following the Orange, Sugar and Cotton having their turns in the rotation - the Big East and ACC champs or Notre Dame had been ranked first or second in the polls, they would have met in the Fiesta Bowl. Their vacated spots in the Orange, Sugar and Cotton would've been filled by a pool of second-place teams from the Big East, ACC, Big Eight, Big Ten, Pac-10, SEC and Southwest conferences. To ensure those second-place teams a bowl, the coalition contracted with the Gator and John Hancock (Sun) bowls to create additional slots. The coalition agreement was set for nine years, subject to review every three years. However, after the first three years, all parties agreed to end it in favor of the Bowl Alliance.

•  The Bowl Alliance was designed to provide the best possible bowl games while bettering the chances of having a No. 1 vs. No. 2 matchup. It matched the champions of the ACC, Big East, SEC and Big 12, along with two highly ranked at-large teams, in three bowls (Fiesta, Sugar and Orange). The champs of the Big Ten and Pac-10 were not part of this alliance and thus neither was the Rose Bowl. The at-large spots were open to teams with at least eight regular-season wins or were ranked in the top 12 in the polls or ranked no lower than the lowest-ranked conference champ chosen to take part. In the first year of the alliance, 1995, an at-large berth was held for the Southwest Conference (which was going out of existence and would be replaced by the Big 12 in 1996). The other at-large spot was guaranteed for Notre Dame, provided it was among the top 10 in the media or coaches' poll. In its first year, the alliance generated a matchup of No. 1 Nebraska and No. 2 Florida in the Fiesta Bowl.

•  The BCS is an outgrowth of the Bowl Alliance and took effect in 1998. It was developed to provide a way to match the top two teams in a true national championship. The title game was to be rotated among four bowls: Fiesta, Sugar, Orange and Rose. The top two teams would be determined by a mathematical formula that takes into account the two major polls, a set of computer rankings, a team's schedule strength and its win-loss record. The formula has been modified over the years and began to incorporate a "quality win" component starting in 2001 to factor in teams' wins against other highly ranked teams.