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"FacebookPinterest\n\nOf course, Paterno\u2014the closest thing college football has to a Northeast intellectual\u2014is himself a Republican; he once gave a convention speech seconding the nomination of George H.W. Bush. Such is the overarching ethic of the sport: a 2009 survey found that college football fans, as an entity, were slightly to the right of NASCAR fans. College football lore is crowded with reactionaries, and this is how many Americans prefer it. This year, Alabama is the defending national champion and the preseason No. 1, and it feels perfectly natural, a throwback to the days when Bear Bryant surveyed practice from a tower and George Wallace openly insulted hippies.\n\nAnd yet, despite that, 2010 has the potential to be the most progressive season in the history of college football, for two reasons. One is a public university in Idaho that plays its home games on turf the color of a Massachusetts electoral map; the other is a Christian school in Texas whose coach devised perhaps the most avant-garde defensive scheme in America.\n\nHeading into this season, Boise State is ranked No. 3; Texas Christian University is ranked No. 6. Last year, the Bowl Championship Series, as it its wont, pulled a straight cop-out, pitting these two undefeated programs\u2014both non-automatic qualifiers, due to their affiliations with smaller conferences\u2014against each other in a Fiesta Bowl that essentially became a consolation game (subjugated to Texas vs. Alabama). But given both teams' preseason rankings, the BCS may not have that option this year. If Boise State beats Virginia Tech on Sept. 6, the chances are pretty good that the Broncos, at least, will play for the national championship. If TCU breezes through its Mountain West conference schedule, it could very well play for the national championship. And this seems to bother the establishment quite a bit.\n\n\"No offense to the upstarts, but is this really the best?\" wrote Darren Everson in Murdoch's Wall Street Journal. \"Is this what we want to see?\"\n\nEverson went on to discuss history and pride and alumni bases. He even alluded to the Roman Colosseum before going on to quote a former television ecutive who confirmed his thesis that no one wants to watch Boise State play. To which I say, I do. And even as a fan of an \"establishment\" program (Penn State, in case you couldn't guess) I don't think I'm alone.\n\nHere's the thing: Even those of us who believe college football is by far the greatest sport on earth are willing to recognize that its postseason is utterly nonsensical. Anyone who is being honest acknowledges that there should be some kind of fix, some way of more effectively determining a national champion that doesn't rely on arbitrary opinion. The problem with college football is that the entrenched interests are too powerful, and so the system is dynamically resistant to change. The problem is that it takes years for a team to play itself into the establishment, and even then, there are no guarantees: Joe Paterno himself has had four undefeated teams\u2014in three different decades\u2014that have failed to be named champions.\n\nWhich is why any blow against the bureaucracy feels like a hole has been hacked in the Berlin Wall. Which is why anyone who believes in a liberal democracy should be rooting for Boise and TCU.\n\nThree-and-a-half years ago, Boise played Oklahoma in the Fiesta Bowl. They won the game, 43-42, on a trick play called the Statue of Liberty, which dates back to the early 1900s. It was a progressive call, yet one rooted in football lore; it should have been enough to earn Boise a certain measure of national respect. But it didn't, really. Despite losing one game in the past two seasons (by a single point, to TCU in the Poinsettia Bowl), the Broncos have never really been considered a national-championship caliber team. They've tried to bolster their regular season schedule, but they can't, because most established powers don't want to play them.\n\nSo it went for TCU last season...12-0 behind Coach Gary Patterson's innovative and risk-taking 4-2-5 defensive scheme, yet shut out of the title contest because Texas converted a last-second field goal against Nebraska in the Big 12 Championship game. They have been on the outside, looking in.\n\nUntil now.\n\nThe best thing for college football is for new teams to play their way into the established order. Boise State or TCU winning a national championship would, at the very least, force the powers that be to rethink the wisdom of their entire system. Next year, Boise will leave the Western Athletic Conference and join TCU in the Mountain West, and the odds seem strong that their conference will somehow become part of the BCS cabal. In other words, the upstarts might very well join the establishment.\n\nWhat they do after that, of course, is anyone's guess.\n\n\u2014Michael Weinreb\n\nWeinreb is the author of Bigger Than the Game: Bo, Boz, the Punky QB, and How the 80's Created the Modern Athlete."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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