Ask any red-blooded American, liberal or conservative, and he or she will tell you that the most pressing matters our nation faces are the economy, national security, and … straightening out the BCS mess. OK, I’m being facetious with that last one. But our president-elect did weigh in on the lack of a playoff system in college football’s top division on “60 Minutes” last night, calling for an eight-team tournament to crown a national champion:

“If you’ve got a bunch of teams who play throughout the season, and many of them have one loss or two losses, there’s no clear decisive winner. We should be creating a playoff system. …

“It would add three extra weeks to the season. You could trim back on the regular season. I don’t know any serious fan of college football who has disagreed with me on this. So, I’m going to throw my weight around a little bit. I think it’s the right thing to do.”

BCS coordinator John Swofford responded:

“For now, our constituencies—and I know he understands constituencies—have settled on the current BCS system, which the majority believe is the best system yet to determine a national champion while also maintaining the college football regular season as the best and most meaningful in sports. … We certainly respect the opinions of President-elect Obama and welcome dialogue on what’s best for college football.”

I agree with Obama on the need for a playoff, but should the president of the United States involve himself in matters of sports? Kind of reminds me of when President Nixon allegedly sent in plays to Washington Redskins coach George Allen, or when President Clinton tried to intervene in the 1994-95 baseball strike.

Tommy Bowden stepped down this week as head coach of the Clemson University football team. This rare mid-season resignation comes after Bowden’s team did not live up to expectations of a pre-season No. 9 national ranking. For several years Bowden—an outspoken Christian like his father, Florida State head coach Bobby Bowden—has been praised because of his character but ridiculed because he appeared soft, weak, and unable to rouse his players.

Comments like “he’s too nice,” “he doesn’t know how to motivate players,” “he too soft,” etc., were uttered as possible explanations for why team members lost confidence in their coach. Nice guys do not make good coaches some argue. On average, are any Christian coaches considered “tough?”

Bowden’s 10-year tenure ended after he was offered a conditional contract extension last year to keep him from leaving to coach at Arkansas. He had to win the Atlantic Coast Conference title in 2008. After a demoralizing loss to Alabama on national television, and a 3-3 start overall, winning the conference title was unlikely. It was time to for him to go.

Under Bowden, Clemson’s football team was known for having a large percentage of players attending church and Bible studies. That’s great but, at the end of the day, what fans want from a NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision program are wins. I have recently found myself asking, “Can Christian coaches cut it in college football?”

And what do schools want: Christian coaches or winning coaches? When the University of Alabama offered Nick Saban a $4 million annual salary, was it because he would put players in church pews? No. Saban was hired because he wants to win football games. Interestingly, none of my Christian friends who are Alabama fans seem concerned about neither Saban’s faith nor any moral influence he might have on his players. I wonder why?

Phillip Fulmer’s a Christian. The Tennessee Volunteers football team is struggling. Mark Richt’s Georgia Bulldogs was absolutely manhandled and humiliated by Saban’s Alabama team. Are these coaches next on the chopping block?

As a nearly idolatrous college football fan, I have to confess that I was happy to see Bowden go. Even worse, several pastor friends and I have joked we could care less about the faith of the next Clemson head coach. We just want someone who will win games. What’s wrong with us?

The college football season is now in full swing, and the pageantry of season openers excited fans on campuses across the country this weekend. In Chapel Hill, N.C., Saturday night, the Tar Heel faithful were treated to an unexpected and dangerous light show when a severe thunderstorm interrupted the first half of Carolina’s game against McNeese State for nearly two hours. Prior to that, the pre-game festivities were supposed to include a dramatic delivery of the game ball by skydivers. The ball and the jumpers, however, never made it to the Kenan Stadium turf, but they did land safely … eight miles away at Duke’s Wallace Wade Stadium, where the Blue Devils were getting ready to take on James Madison. According to The News & Observer of Raleigh, the jump was aborted over Chapel Hill because of the weather, but when the clouds suddenly parted and the pilot saw a stadium, the jumpers decided to go for it.

By the way, both Carolina and Duke won their games.

The preseason USA Today college football Coaches’ Poll is out, with the Mark Richt–coached Georgia Bulldogs ranked No. 1.

After the 2000 season, Vince Dooley, the former Georgia head coach who was then the school’s athletics director, was shopping for a new football coach and approached Florida State coach Bobby Bowden about hiring Richt, the Seminoles’ offensive coordinator. Bowden warned Dooley, “The one thing that worries me about him is he’s too nice.” Since then, this “nice” guy has disproven the old adage “nice guys finish last” by winning 80 percent of his games and two Southeastern Conference championships. “We have found out he has an inner toughness that makes him able to handle it,” Bowden told USA Today.

So where does Richt find that “inner toughness” he couples with his nice guy image? In its article on the Bulldogs yesterday, USA Today shared some of the things that drive the 48-year-old coach:

The fact that life now is exceedingly normal is a blessing given [his wife] Katharyn was diagnosed with cervical cancer in the spring of 2006. Complications after a radical hysterectomy made the situation more frightening. “I didn’t handle it all well. I got numb,” Mark Richt says. Only until the water girl was back on the sidelines and cancer-free did everyone exhale.

The Richts have four children: Jonathan, 18, a freshman quarterback at Clemson; David, 13; Zach, 12; and Anya, 11. The Richts adopted the youngest two from an orphanage in Ukraine in 1999, a decision guided by their religious faith.

The Richts also have taken their children on mission trips, most recently to Honduras last year. That experience prompted Richt to organize an NCAA-approved, five-day trip with two dozen of his players in May. The players delivered water to residents of poverty-stricken Guaimaca in Honduras, repaired fences, dug ditches and footers for houses, shared their Christian faith if so inclined and learned a little about the world.

“It helped us realize how privileged we are and sometimes don’t appreciate the blessings we do have,” [Georgia defensive end Roderick] Battle says.

Two days after Richt returned from Honduras, he joined four other college coaches visiting U.S. military bases during a week-long trip to the Middle East. “We tried to encourage everyone, but we left encouraged,” Richt says.

Too often, Christian coaches and athletes are labeled “too nice” or “too soft” to do the job. But now that a “nice guy” like Mark Richt has found success, maybe more ADs will make “niceness” a priority in their next coaching hires.

(Click here to read Mark Richt’s testimony.)

It’s happened only once in the NFL, when the 1972 Miami Dolphins, coached by Don Shula and led by the running of Larry Csonka and Mercury Morris along with the always tough “No-Name Defense,” defeated the Washington Redskins in Super Bowl VII.

In NCAA men’s basketball, it’s been accomplished by seven teams, the last time back in 1976, when the Indiana Hoosiers, led by coach Bobby Knight and the trio of Scott May, Kent Benson, and Quinn Buckner, took care of Big Ten rival Michigan in the NCAA tournament championship game. (The other six were San Francisco in 1956, North Carolina in ’57, and John Wooden’s UCLA teams in ’64, ’67, ’72, and ’73.)

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Well, we have a national champion in college football.  And the winner is: the Louisiana State University.  As ESPN’s Pat Forde writes about Florida’s victory last year over Ohio State and LSU’s victory last night over the same, “If you’ve ever seen lions maul a water buffalo, you’ve seen the last two title games.”  The long and short of this is that the real winner of the BCS this year is the SEC.  We invented the athletic scholarship, which is to say, we destroyed higher education, but we invented modern college football.  Granted, Slate’s LSU fan-slash-writer Josh Levin does admit that

Kansas and Missouri and USC and Georgia and West Virginia can make sensible claims that they’re the Tigers’ equal. By my count, eight different teams could’ve won the title if one or two plays had gone differently. After Monday night, at least we know the Buckeyes aren’t one of them.

Perhaps this is as close as the South will ever get to rising again.  And we love watching it.

The Bowl Championship Series was designed to create excitement for college football fans, culminating with the (supposedly) top two teams fighting it out for the national championship. And I’m sure a lot of you will tune in Monday night to see Ohio State battle LSU, but how many of you felt compelled to watch the other BCS bowls — the Rose, Sugar, Fiesta, and Orange — this week?

In the pre-BCS era, these games generated a lot more excitement and carried a lot more significance than they do now, especially back when the combination of results would have national championship ramifications. Plus, it was much more dramatic when they all were played on New Year’s Day. Because of the way the BCS is now set up, these so-called “major” bowls leading up to the championship game are nothing more than consolation games (remember the old third-place game in the NCAA basketball tournament?) and carry about as much significance as the Meineke Car Care and Emerald Nuts bowls.

I think it’s time to either institute a true playoff format incorporating the major bowls or scrap the BCS and go back to the way it used to be. What’s your opinion?

What do you do if your team has been invited to play in a bowl game nearly 5,000 miles away and two days before Christmas? Well, if you’re East Carolina Pirates fans, you buy up the tickets allotted to your school for the Sheraton Hawaii Bowl against Boise State and give them away as Christmas presents to military personnel stationed away from home on the islands.

Should college football players get paid? That’s the question Michael Lewis at The New York Times ponders:

This is maybe the oddest aspect of the college football business. Everyone associated with it is getting rich except the people whose labor creates the value. At this moment there are thousands of big-time college football players, many of whom are black and poor. They perform for the intense pleasure of millions of rabid college football fans, many of whom are rich and white. The world’s most enthusiastic racially integrated marketplace is waiting to happen.

What do you think?

The college Bowl Championship System is a joke. The wild ending to this year’s college football season proves once again that the BCS computer ranking system is incapable of choosing the best teams to play for a national title. We are actually no better off than we were before the benign system was put into place in 1998. Gene Wojciechowski at ESPN.com comments on this season:

By sheer accident, nothing more, Ohio State and LSU will play Jan. 7 in the Allstate BCS National Championship Game. A few days ago it was supposed to be Mizzou vs. West Virginia. And before that, Kansas vs. LSU. . . Nobody is playing better than OU, Georgia or USC right now. But it’s Ohio State, with its puppy fur-soft nonconference schedule and so-so Big Ten quality, that was chosen for New Orleans. Interesting, since the Buckeyes didn’t register a win against a top 20 team at the time they played. At least inconsistent LSU mostly survived a killer conference and won its league championship game.

Wojciechowski’s right. Ohio State is playing on the platform of a fatally flawed system. Chaos.

Perhaps a little moral philosophy might help. David Schmidtz in his book The Elements of Justice reminds us that pursuing equality along one axis will produce inequality along another. Using a computer program to crunch a few random stats to increase “objectivity” has done nothing but decrease, if not obliterate, rationality. As such, the best performing teams do not actually play for the national title. There is absolutely no reason Ohio State should be playing for the national championship–no, not even one.

Here’s a puzzle: Why is it that high school football, professional football, college basketball, professional basketball, and so on, all have playoff systems but, for some reason, the NCAA can’t figure this out for college football? We learn something important here if we’re honest: the NCAA does not want a college playoff system. The profit machine will not allow for college football playoffs so, friends, stop dreaming.

Gregg Easterbrook over at ESPN.com says we must remember this about the BCS: “the system is not designed to choose a final victor! The BCS is designed to maximize revenue and exposure for the major conferences. And the BCS does that very well, thank you.”

So the winner of the LSU/Ohio State game will not actually be the “national champion” in college football. Instead, the winner will be the champion of a computer-driven, nationwide, fantasy football league run by coaches and sports journalists. And friends, we have the privilege of being mere spectators. After all, who cares if the best teams never play each other at the end of the season? What really matters is that certain schools get the best exposure for student recruitment and increased donor support, right? Pathetic.

When do the NFL playoffs start?