John Walters

The Longhorns drew the short straw. The Sooners staked their claim.

Thanksgiving weekend began with fans in Austin hoisting signs declaring "45-35" (the final score of this year's Red River Shootout). It ends with the more unwieldy fractions ".9351-.9223" ... which happen to be Oklahoma’s and Texas’ respective BCS averages.

Longhorns: "Scoreboard! Scoreboard!"

Sooners: "Complicated amalgam of two polls and the average of six computer ranking systems! Complicated amalgam of two polls and ... we win, suckers!"

The BCS rankings came out on Sunday and Oklahoma finished second, ahead of the Longhorns, who finished third, by the narrowest of margins. In the USA Today/Coaches poll, one of the two polls used in the BCS formula, Oklahoma finished with 1,397 points to 1,396 points for Texas. In that poll, in which 61 FBS head coaches vote, one person literally was the difference. It makes you wonder where this voter positioned the two schools in the pecking order.

The blather in the coming days, now that the Big 12 South has devolved into a forgettable Kevin Costner film, will concern whether this is fair. But, to quote a colleague of mine, Matt Hinton of DrSaturday.com, "there is no fair" in this matter.

Please, Sooners fans, stop gloating. Please, Longhorns fans, stop whining. This does not prove that Oklahoma is better than Texas. This was Sophie’s Choice meets the gridiron. There is no fair.

You may as well claim that burnt orange is a better color than crimson.

Quickly, then, the cases for both:

• Oklahoma finished 11-1, has the highest scoring offense in the nation, pulverized Texas Tech in one of two network prime-time televised games to conclude its season, and has the highest scoring offense in the nation (yes, I did mention that twice).
• Texas finished 11-1, lost its only game on an incredible play with 0:01 remaining on the road, has a quarterback with a ridiculously hot girlfriend who is always shown standing next to said QB’s parents in the stands even though the announcers only acknowledge the parents, and, by the way, the Longhorns beat Oklahoma.

Oklahoma, by virtue of its higher BCS ranking, wins the Big 12 South, breaking the three-way tie between itself, Texas and Texas Tech. The Sooners advance to the Big 12 championship game to annihil — play Missouri. If Bob Stoops' high-scoring team wins, then it is most likely on to the BCS championship game in Miami on Jan. 8.

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Don’t blame the BCS for this outcome, by the way (I understand: blaming the BCS this time of year is just so reflexive). The Big 12 Conference established that standard as a three-way tiebreaker, not the BCS.

The OU-Texas controversy will dominate the debate in the coming days, but that will subside. Life is not always fair, but life goes on. Ask Jennifer Aniston. When it comes to potential miscarriages of justice, to controversies, to First-and-Ten-style smackdowns, sports fans, I want you to be ahead of the curve. Texas or Oklahoma is so this week.

Here, if just a few things happen, is next week’s: Why isn’t the Rose Bowl the national championship game?

Next Saturday, if USC beats UCLA (certainly), if Oklahoma beats Missouri (likely), and if Florida beats No. 1 Alabama (possibly), this will be the fallout: Two one-loss teams, Oklahoma and Florida, will meet in the BCS championship game. Meanwhile, two one-loss teams, USC and Penn State, will meet in the Rose Bowl. Who is anyone to say which game will produce the national champion?

Because the games take place in Miami and Pasadena, there is a temptation to position this contretemps as an East Coast-Left Coast debate. Actually, it’s a left score-right score argument.

If you believe Oklahoma and Florida are the two most worthy one-loss teams in the country, you are a left-score advocate. That is, you place greatest value on how many points the Sooners and Gators score. Oklahoma, as mentioned, leads the nation in scoring (53.33 points per game) while Florida ranks third (46.33).

Then again, so what? Are the Sooners’ 7.5 touchdowns per game more impressive than USC’s top-rated scoring defense, which allows just 7.8 points per game? As for Penn State, the Nittany Lions may not be singularly impressive on either side of the ball as the other three, but Joe Paterno’s squads have long since mastered the art of converting skeptics in big-time bowl games (see, 1982 Sugar Bowl, 1986 Fiesta Bowl, 1994 Rose Bowl, 2006 Orange Bowl).

Here’s a simple formula: take a team’s national rankings in scoring offense and scoring defense and add them. You can make the argument that the two teams with the lowest sums are the two most complete outfits. If we were to do that with the six BCS conference teams realistically or on the fringes of the national title picture, the rankings would look like this:

The Sooners, then, are your classic left-score program. Oklahoma has wowed — and wooed — the voters by scoring 60 or more points in their last four games, earning the cover of SI in the process. And yet none of the other five one-loss teams has a starting unit that is anywhere near the bottom half of the national rankings, which is where Oklahoma’s defense finds itself. Offense wins championships? Or does it just draw higher Nielsen numbers?

(Texas Tech, in case you are curious, finishes 5 + 69, for 74, in this formula. Utah is 17 + 18 = 35; and Boise State is an impressive 12 + 4 =  16).

Florida, Penn State and USC all have one loss, and each loss came at the expense of an opponent who finished the season 8-4. All three teams lost by six points or less, two of them by a single point. The Gators are the only one of the three to have lost at home, though.

Ah, but due to the SEC having a championship game, Florida gets a chance to make the most emphatic statement if they can defeat the current No. 1 team in the BCS standings, Alabama (whom nobody is talking about ... and I fear that we will all live to regret this).

Oklahoma, in their defense (and if you look at that ranking again, Bob Stoops needs all the help he can get there), is the only team among the quartet to face two non-conference foes currently in the Top 25 of the BCS standings, Cincinnati (13) and TCU (11). The Sooners waxed both by approximately 25 points.

And now, unlike USC and Penn State, Stoops has the opportunity to showcase his team one final time next Saturday against a quality opponent. Pete Carroll gets ... UCLAme. Joe Paterno likely has a date with his physical therapist.

That’s next week’s controversy, then, brought to you this week: the Second-hand Rose Bowl. Let it be said that a preponderance of right-score voters and a dearth of conference championship games in the Pac-10 and Big Ten (and what, by the way, would be so anathema about a conference with eleven, or even ten, teams having itself a conference title game?) will likely damn the Trojans and Nittany Lions to a New Year’s Day exhibition, and nothing else.

But it is worth asking, seeing as how Oklahoma was able to jump ahead of Texas based largely on those 61 points (nevermind that they allowed 41, or more than USC has surrendered in its last seven games combined) they put up at Oklahoma State.

But that does beg the question: Just how outrageous would the score of the USC-UCLA game need to be to send the Trojans on a transcontinental flight? 80-0?

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