One of the polls used in the BCS system is the Peter Wolfe rankings—no Prokofiev jokes, please. According to Wolfe's Web site, "A significant but hard-to-measure factor in comparing teams is sportsmanship. Running up the score is generally looked on as evidence of bad sportsmanship, behavior which should not be encouraged or rewarded. With this in mind, the BCS has chosen computer systems that use only won/loss data (and not scoring margin) to compute ratings. We have developed such a system that provides reasonable results."

I don't question that Wolfe is a good man doing the best he can within the BCS strictures, but this is childish pablum. The prohibition against using point differentials to rank teams, of course, dates from the Nebraska-in-2001 experience, when those dirty Cornhuskers beat Troy State, Rice, Missouri, Iowa State, Baylor, and Kansas all by 28 points or more. The BCS reacted to this by requiring the computer rankings to treat a 56-7 victory the same as a 20-17 contest.

This is very much like a situation in which a surgeon leaves a scalpel in a patient, and the hospital reacts by prohibiting surgeons from using scalpels. I understand that the point of the game is to win, not to score as many points as possible, and I certainly can understand football coaches saying, "We want a system that emphasizes winning and diminishes the importance of the score." That's reasonable.

But saying, "We're not going to pay any attention to the score of the game, and, by the way, you can't pay any attention to whether it is a home game or a road game, either"—that's just stupid, Gomer.