Alphabet soup

At a party last weekend, a friend of mine, let’s call him Fred Fan, approached me with a scowl on his face and a question on his lips, “How come you didn’t show the Rose Bowl?”

“I don’t have anything to do with that,” I explained.

“Well, you’re the sports on TV.”

“Only for KSPN. I do not work for MCV. Anyway MCV didn’t have the rights to show the game. ABC-7 did. The cable company just carries their channel,” I informed.

Scrunching his face, he whined, “That was a big game. I really wanted to see it.”

“Me too. So did a lot of people I know.”And then to make it hurt more, “They got it on Guam.”

Fan, frowning, fretted, “Then why didn’t Saipan get the game? They don’t like us or what?”

I could have said that Saipan sports fans looking forward to watching live sports have been hit on the head and knocked backward ever since ABC-7 took over with countless missed games available on the satellite plus lousy video quality that sometimes is unwatchable, like the Celtics/Lakers Christmas game that I happened to see in such fine quality while visiting Guam the week before, which was played here instead of the Rose Bowl, except for a brief, perhaps 10 minutes or so when it was aired live, as if to taunt us suffering, lowly sports fans with a tease telling us they could show it if they really wanted to before going back to basketball with video that I believe was intentionally distorted by adding snow and rolling horizontal lines to help aspirin sellers, but I didn’t, instead I simply concurred, “Yep, they don’t like us.”

I should have told Fred Fan to thank the god of the sky that the college football BCS championship is a FOX game, not ABC, but I was at the party to enjoy myself, not get pissed off and went to get another drink.

By the way, if you need a pronunciation guide for BCS, it’s this: the C is silent.

BCS still rhymes with mess and has for the last eleven years. Prior to 1998, there were two polls, one for writers and one for coaches. Some years there were split champions which seeing how unscientific and argumentative the case for one team or another can be, it’s not surprising to have differing but legitimate claims to the title.

If this was pre-BCS, then I would say give to Utah, the only team to go undefeated. But this is BCS time, and they didn’t even get a chance to play a conference champion, much less the No. 1 or No. 2 team. So nice season, Utes, but beating an unmotivated runner-up doesn’t make you a champion. If they want to complain, they have to stand in line.

Texas, who agreed to that crazy Big 12 tiebreaker rule, can’t blame anyone except themselves. Sure, they belonged in the BCS championship game over Oklahoma but get no sympathy after needing a questionable line spot and boneheaded defensive play calling to get by pathetic Ohio State, from the pathetic Big 10 which went 1-6 in bowl games this season. Any conference that has eleven teams and calls themselves the Big 10 has something intrinsically wrong with it.

Ditto for USC. The Trojans may have the best team this season but beating a Big 10 team in the Rose Bowl gets no brownie points.

The BCS is basically a one game playoff between the top two mysteriously ranked teams. That’s Oklahoma and Florida. The winner gets all the marbles.

If you don’t like it, don’t go to the Whine Department. They ran out of complaint forms.

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