This isn't your father's college football anymore. It's your trigonometry teacher's.
Sadly, the great gridiron game on which I was reared and from which arrived my childhood heroes now holds decimal points and derivatives more dear than the pride and pageantry that established it as America's lifeblood.
Blaming the Bowl Championship Series and its convoluted ranking formula is always the trendy thing to do, but college football's obsession with the insignificant and renunciation of the important began eons before the BCS cronies decided to confuse us all.
It all started with the polls.
First, God bless us, we had but one, the AP. Then ESPN felt compelled to be vitally involved, so "the worldwide leader in sports" joined forces with USA Today to publish a coaches' poll.
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Next thing you know, we have The Sporting News Power Poll ... and the CNN/SI Fan Poll ... and the Sagarin Rankings ... and The Dunkel Index ... and the BCS, among others.
The Dunkel Index? Enough already!
Maybe if this gaggle of polls carried some semblance of closure to the ever-burning "Who's No. 1?" question, I'd feel more at ease.
But it doesn't, so I don't.
In fact, the overabundance of polls has produced just the reverse: It has baffled the hell out of me, along with every other college football fan.
Entering Saturday's slate of games - with a schedule that would see both Virginia Tech and Clemson have their heads handed to them - the polls told us a tale surpassing even "Being John Malkovich" in confusion.
Each system placed Oklahoma atop its throne. After that, it gets thorny.
The AP liked Virginia Tech second, tailed by Miami, Florida State and Nebraska.
By contrast, the ESPN/USA Today Coaches' Poll preferred Florida over Nebraska at five, while the power poll flipped Virginia Tech and Miami.
And then there's the BCS, the granddaddy of them all - the one the college football hierarchy uses to distinguish its two national championship contenders from the other 113 pretenders.
The oh-so-dependable BCS tabbed Oklahoma numero uno, Virginia Tech just behind the booming Sooners and, inexplicably, Florida State third, two spots ahead of a Miami team that vanquished the 'Noles just two weeks prior.
The BCS rationalizes the mess it has fashioned by pointing to its master equation, a torturously dense scheme that considers everything from margin of victory to opponents' schedule strength to poll results to computer rankings compiled by such anonymous men as Kenneth Massey and David Rothman.
Who?
It's only logical that in a scathing indictment of the present-day rankings nightmare, a case for a college football playoff should be made next.
It's certainly an easy argument to take up, but I'll save myself the trouble and leave that to the millions of American sportswriters with a dash of common sense who share in my scorn.
Come Dec. 1, it's quite possible that as many as five teams could all have one loss, yet only two are blessed with the opportunity to vie for the big prize.
That's not the most disheartening part, though.
What pains me most is college football's abjuration of what made it great to begin with: the unbeatable rivalries, the unparalleled spirit, the unmatched pride.
Just 10 days ago, then top-ranked Nebraska and No. 3 Oklahoma tussled in a revival of perhaps college football's finest gridiron tradition. Combined, the two institutions boast nine national championships and five Heisman Trophy winners, yet all anyone could talk about was the silly BCS ranking attached to each. A replay of the "Game of the Century" 29 years later was reduced to something out of Michael Dell's brain.
I guess it's only fitting that in a society where technology touches and often taints every corner of our existence, not even college football is immune.
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