Arkansas is the best state in the country and if anybody disagrees with me I’ll fight them in front of Proctor Friday morning

It’s that time of year again, folks. Thanksgiving has come and gone, the turkeys have been eaten, the dishes have been washed, the crazy uncles have been put back out to pasture –– all that’s left is to decide the major college football championships and start our nation’s annual hatefest on the antichrist of college football, the Bowl Championship Series. For those of you who don’t know, the BCS is the current way of deciding the Football Bowl Subdivision (formerly Division 1-A) national champion. It is comprised of five bowl games –– one of which is a pre-designated national championship rumble for the teams ranked one and two in the BCS standings; the other four invite the champions from the automatic qualifying conferences, the best team from the non-AQ conferences and fill the remaining spots with highly-ranked at large teams.

The BCS was created in order to ensure that the most deserving teams played for the title, while still appropriating spots in prestigious bowls for major conference champions. Sounds fair, right? Well, not according to the mainstream sports media, which would rank the BCS slightly behind Hitler and slightly ahead of Regan’s domestic policies on the list of most blatantly evil things of all time. Every year a Boise St., a Hawaii or a TCU goes undefeated and suddenly cries of “unfair!” and “playoff!” resound from sea to shining sea, the classic case of sports writers rooting for David against Goliath.

Never mind that what Goliath does dictates the entire college sports landscape, and pays the sportswriter’s salaries in the first place. Never mind that the teams from the AQ play schedules that would make the little schools quake in their little WAC cleats. Take a team like Arkansas, for example. This year they finished 10-2, with their only two losses coming to (at the time) #1 ranked Alabama and #2 ranked Auburn. Are you telling me they are not more deserving of going to a major bowl than Boise St., whose marquee victory this year came over a Virginia Tech team that lost to James Madison and that couldn’t even make a 26-yard field goal to beat Nevada?

I admit a bit of a regional bias (If I had it my way the winner of the SEC would be the automatic national champion), but the fact of the matter remains that strength of schedule simply cannot be ignored. And teams that regularly feast on Louisiana Tech and Utah St. while losing to Nevada simply do not belong in the BCS title game.

Is the BCS system perfect? Absolutely not. Does the Big East deserve an automatic bid? Probably not, although the addition of TCU will strengthen that conference’s football street cred. But the simple fact is that the BCS gets it right most of the time, and doesn’t get enough credit for that. Who could forget Penn St. vs. Florida St. in 2006, which pitted the legendary Bowden against the incomparable Paterno? Or Boise St. vs. Oklahoma in 2007, maybe the best college football game ever played? And when it comes to national championship games, it’s hard for any team to argue that they were excluded, except for maybe Auburn in 2005. This year, the BCS will get it right. If neither #1 Auburn or #2 Oregon loses their season finale, they will play for the title. If either of them lose, TCU will be ushered in. And guess what? TCU (for the time being) is from a non-AQ conference. That’s some pretty sneaky fairness there, BCS.

–– Dillon Hupp ’12 is a sports editor from Little Rock, Ar. He met Rex Ryan at the Newark airport on Friday. It was awesome.