The discussion provoked by my final BlogPoll ballot generated some comments which warranted detailed responses and this posting is the latest installment in a series of attempts to address issues dealing directly with the fundaments of college football in the 21st century. After offering an answer to some questions from DC Trojan, I made an initial effort at replying to a lengthy comment by BCSBusters, the pertinent portion of which reads as follows:

Secondly, and as a result of the first point, I believe it is important that you know where I am coming from before you fairly are able to evaluate my response. As someone who believes bloggers ought to be forthright about admitting their biases, I freely admit that I am an S.E.C. homer and I openly set forth the reasons why I am a Georgia fan.

This might have had a little something to do with it.

As a supporter of restoring the traditional pre-B.C.S. bowl tie-ins, I have defended Pac-10 commissioner Tom Hansen's defense of the Rose Bowl, even though I believe the best scenario is for the Granddaddy of 'Em All to give a guaranteed berth to the Pac-10 champion but not to the Big Ten champion. After tracing the history of bowl games, I proposed the following reform:

Surely none of those ideas would have turned out any worse than giving Hawaii a Sugar Bowl bid did.

Moreover, while I believe I have given as good as I have gotten whenever the S.E.C. has been maligned or mischaracterized (as evidenced by the earlier and more heated portions of BCSBusters's and my exchange), I also have been willing to criticize my conference when the need arises.

While I take great pride in Georgia's football heritage, and particularly in Georgia's 50-year tradition of national scheduling that arose after Georgia stopped playing high school teams, I have no qualms about offering such constructive criticisms as these:

I'm still on the fence about participating in the Clone Wars, though.

All that having been said, I see BCSBusters's points, but I also see some problems with them. I simply don't buy the premise that a team has any business grousing about a B.C.S. bowl snub if that squad subsequently comes up short in a lesser postseason outing. Nearly a year ago, I wrote the following in support of the proposition that, if you lose, you no longer get to complain:

As I previously noted, any griping on behalf of Cal or any similarly situated team "is the equivalent of saying, 'Team A was a No. 5 N.C.A.A. tournament seed that got bounced in the first round by a No. 12 seed . . . but Team A really deserved a No. 3 seed!'" That argument will never make even the slightest headway with me. Head coaches are compensated handsomely to get their teams prepared and properly motivated. If the desire to silence the doubters isn't sufficient incentive for a team to play well enough to win against an inferior opponent, that's a point in the column of the doubters.

If you want to disprove the conventional wisdom of the polls, winning will serve you better than whining.

I likewise consider dubious the assertion that U.S.C. somehow was a victim of the system left on the outside looking in on the party to which the Trojans were not invited. Prior to Pete Carroll's arrival in the City of Angels, Southern California's pedigree included five national championships and four Heisman Trophy winners. As BCSBusters says, the Men of Troy did not receive a bid to the B.C.S. championship game until they finished the 2004 regular season with a 12-0 record and had won 31 outings in a 32-game span. Even before that, though, U.S.C. produced a Heisman Trophy recipient in 2002 and captured a share of the national title in 2003, despite not having appeared in the designated championship bowl game.

Even if the Trojans were given short shrift in that instance, though, they were far from alone. Georgia began the 2007 campaign as the winningest program in the S.E.C. over the course of the previous decade and the previous half-decade. No other team in the league had won nine games in each of the preceding five seasons and Mark Richt had established himself as just the fifth coach in Southeastern Conference history to have posted four straight ten-win seasons. Coach Richt's current career ledger of 72-19 not only makes him the best coach Georgia has ever had, it puts him not terribly far behind Coach Carroll, who has gone 76-14 over the same span (2001-2007).

The Bulldogs have won 64 of their last 79 games . . . yet, despite being as good a program as any in the S.E.C. (so much so that the Red and Black appear on the verge of becoming Southern Cal with a Southern accent), still we must contend with this sort of specious nonsense:

This brings us to the much-maligned College Football Association (C.F.A.), which has been defunct for more than a decade because it devolved into the sort of cartel it sought to replace, but which served its purposes well during its heyday. As recounted in John Sayle Watterson's College Football: History, Spectacle, Controversy, the C.F.A. came into being in response to the explosive growth of Division I to nearly 250 participating schools (some of which did not field football teams) and the extreme revenue-sharing proposals made by Stephen Horn, the grandstanding populist president of California State University-Long Beach who used the publicity he garnered from his quixotic efforts at playing Robin Hood to springboard a successful run for the U.S. House of Representatives.

Horn's radical reforms, which Michigan athletic director Don Canham derided as "socialism," would have divided up the television revenue pie in a manner that may have kept some failing programs like Long Beach's afloat but would have done so at the expense of schools like Northwestern and Rice, which played in major conferences but rarely appeared on television. The C.F.A., led by former Big Eight commissioner Chuck Neinas and University of Georgia president Fred Davison, had a better idea: bake a bigger pie.

N.C.A.A. executive director Walter Byers represented all institutions in the association in contract negotiations with television networks. A percentage of the revenues went to the purportedly non-profit N.C.A.A. in the form of a "football assessment," in exchange for which Byers made arrangements with A.B.C.'s Roone Arledge for the broadcast rights to college football games. Unfortunately, Byers took the shortsighted view that college football contests should be aired only sparingly, to avoid the risk of cheapening the coin through overexposure.

Admittedly, some folks really would do well to take the fear of overexposure to heart.

Byers's approach was particularly poorly timed, coming as it did when the N.F.L. was seizing an increasingly larger share of the football-hungry viewing audience. (Arledge himself had helped to perpetuate this trend, as he had created "Monday Night Football.") When Byers negotiated a deal with Arledge for A.B.C. to pay $29 million for the exclusive broadcast rights to N.C.A.A. football games for the 1978 and 1979 seasons, the C.F.A. (which consisted of the major independents, including Notre Dame, and the major conferences other than the Big Ten and the Pac-10) assigned Neinas, who previously had worked under Byers in N.C.A.A. television, the task of finding a better deal elsewhere.

Neinas succeeded spectacularly at his job. By the summer of 1981, the former conference commissioner had hammered out a deal with N.B.C. whereby the Peacock Network would pay $180 million for three years' worth of broadcast rights to C.F.A. members' games. This forced Byers's hand, necessitating that he arrange contracts worth $285 million over a four-year period between the N.C.A.A. and A.B.C., C.B.S., and T.B.S.

However, as Watterson notes, even the more lucrative N.C.A.A. deal "still kept a lid on the telecasts of big games." The C.F.A. wanted to move in the direction the future would confirm was the correct one---namely, cable television---but the foundation for Byers's entire strategy was to limit the number of contests that would be broadcast. The myopic mindset adopted by the N.C.A.A.'s chief negotiator remained unchanged until C.F.A. members such as the University of Georgia successfully mounted the legal challenge in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the several schools had an ownership interest in the broadcast rights to their own games.

At a time when the costs of intercollegiate athletics were spiraling out of control, leaving smaller schools especially susceptible to being driven out of the sports arena by too high a price tag, the C.F.A. tapped the sources of revenue the N.C.A.A. refused to pursue, thereby opening up the market and causing the popularity of college football to grow explosively. While the C.F.A. acted for the immediate benefit of the powerhouse programs and what we now call B.C.S. conferences, the benefits have accrued to every team in Division I-A, not equally but not inequitably. By the time the C.F.A. closed its doors in 1997, the success of the organization's court battle had produced not only the famous T.V. contracts between the S.E.C. and C.B.S. and between Notre Dame and N.B.C., but also, in the immediate aftermath of the 1984 Supreme Court decision, a four-year deal between C.B.S. and the non-C.F.A. Big Ten and Pac-10 conferences worth $10 million, as well as a $1 million deal for public television to air the games of the Division I-AA Ivy League.

Darn those greedy big-time football factories!

As evidenced by Dave's complaints about Pac-10 commissioner Tom Hansen, the C.F.A. was right about broadening college football's broadcast partnerships in order to televise more games and bring the sport into viewers' homes through the new medium of cable. College football's wider array of affrays offered over the airwaves has led to the scheduling of higher-profile inter-conference contests such as those pitting Georgia against Oklahoma State and Colorado against West Virginia, as well as providing college football options on Thursdays, Fridays, and other weeknights, for which even critics of the Worldwide Leader are grateful.

Clearly, the C.F.A.'s approach to television contracts has allowed the rich to get richer. This, however, has not caused the poor to get poorer. My brother-in-law likes to use golf as an economic analogy: if, over the course of the next year, he shaves three strokes per round off of his golf game, and if, over the course of that same year, Tiger Woods shaves four strokes per round off of his golf game, Tiger Woods will still be a significantly better golfer than my brother-in-law, and the gap between their respective golf games will have widened, but they'll both be better golfers.

In a classic example of self-interested actors working to everyone's economic advantage through the invisible hand, the C.F.A. heightened the popularity and marketability of college football, which boosted everyone's exposure and revenue, for the have nots as well as for the haves. Anyone who doubts that proposition needs to stand in front of the mirror and ask himself this question: "Are Boise State's, West Virginia's, and, heck, Georgia Tech's football programs better off or worse off because ESPN televises Thursday night games?" These W.A.C., Big East, and A.C.C. teams are not a part of the B.C.S. "Oligarchic" Super Division, but they are beneficiaries (however unintended) of the C.F.A.'s efforts. John F. Kennedy was right that a rising tide lifts all boats.

As a staunch supporter of polls and bowls, I have no problem with the notion of allowing voters spread throughout the country to cast ballots to determine the top 25 teams in the land. As I explained at my old weblog:

It seems to me, therefore, that the system presently extant in college football is fundamentally American in character, both as to its aspiration and as to its execution. Entrenched parochial interests offset one another and newcomers have the opportunity to rise by virtue of effort and talent, even if the process of self-improvement is not as rapid and unhindered as we would like in sports any more than it is in life. Nevertheless, for all its imperfections, it is a system that reminds us what a great country this truly is . . . not just here on the East Coast, but from sea to shining sea.

God bless America. (Lest anyone complain about the fact that I didn't go with the Jessica Simpson picture, I should point out that Big Blue View has you covered.)

That, at any rate, is how it appears to me from my vantage point. Due to the importance of the issues in play here, I invite and even encourage feedback in the comments below, from BCSBusters specifically and from any other readers wishing to share their thoughts. With respect to my final BlogPoll ballot---which was the catalyst that began this worthwhile discussion in the first place---I would like your assessment of how these perspectives and preconceptions play out where the rubber meets the road.

I ranked or gave serious consideration to ranking five teams from the A.C.C. (Boston College, Clemson, Virginia, Virginia Tech, and Wake Forest), four from the Big East (Cincinnati, Connecticut, South Florida, and West Virginia), five from the Big Ten (Illinois, Michigan, Ohio State, Penn State, and Wisconsin), five from the Big 12 (Kansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Texas, and Texas Tech), two from Conference USA (Central Florida and Tulsa), four from the Mountain West (Air Force, B.Y.U., New Mexico, and Utah), four from the Pac-10 (Arizona State, Oregon, Oregon State, and U.S.C.), five from the S.E.C. (Auburn, Florida, Georgia, L.S.U., and Tennessee), and three from the W.A.C. (Boise State, Fresno State, and Hawaii). Who's overrated? Who's underrated? Who's been overlooked altogether? I am open to having my blind spots illuminated, as enlightenment is more than merely one of my favorite "Doctor Who" episodes.

Go 'Dawgs!