There was Oregon coach Mike Bellotti working the edges of the 2002 Rose Bowl, witnessing Miami's destruction of Nebraska and reporting his disenchantment over a system that didn't deliver the Ducks its date with destiny. The Hurricanes hugged and hollered, unbeaten and undisputed national champions, but the BCS computers and polls never spit out the game everyone wanted to see: Miami-Oregon, Dorsey-Harrington, No. 1 vs. No. 2.

	Oregon coach Mike Bellotti just wanted a chance to play Miami.

"We'd like to have a shot at that team," Bellotti said wistfully, but best of all he understood it was too late to talk this way. There was no shot at No. 1, no shot at justice, no shot at changing college football's cold truth about championships. The best team had won the national title, but it just hadn't beat the second-best team to do it. For that season, anyway, there probably wasn't a worthier champion out there -- just a worthier championship game.

Next time, who knows? That's the trouble with this system, its tragic flaw. For college football, the best games with the best teams shouldn't be so hard to make happen. Once and for all, the university presidents ought to bring a humanity to a most inhumane BCS system.

All it needs is a committee cut out of the NCAA basketball cloth, a panel needing to use the computer rankings and polls not like gospel, but like the RPI. Why can't a reasonable, conscientious and informed committee of commissioners and athletics directors deliver an NCAA championship football game, the way others do a 65-team basketball tournament? Let them spend the season getting out to stadiums, watching tapes and studying the contenders. Let them be the safety net to make sure the right teams play for the national title. Above all, let them be the last line of defense on the sport's credibility.

College football doesn't need an elaborate, eight-team tournament, an upheaval of the bowl system. Of course, the bowls could use a complete upheaval, but the grubbing for those bid dollars will never allow it.

Generally, most of the bowls are a complete waste of time, as thrilling and relevant as NIT basketball games. Kids have to practice an extra month, through final exams, to get rewarded for a 6-5 season. They get to go to a bowl that's so prestigious the coach gets fired for ending up there. Let's face it: Any team that becomes "bowl eligible" in the final week of the season is a team nobody beyond its boosters wants to see in the postseason anyway.

That's college football, though. That's its history, its tradition, and nobody messes with it. This is a sport with its power base in the South, where tradition is everything. And perhaps, this makes it less shocking that the most influential university presidents are slow to sell out to proposals for bigger, richer paydays. There are billions of dollars to be made on a tournament that turns the bowl games into tournaments stops, lurching toward a Final Four and a college Super Bowl.

And yet, if nothing else, give college football this: It refuses to sell something out that college basketball did long ago: the regular season. Between the conference tournaments and the 64-team postseason, college basketball has rendered its winter virtually meaningless, transforming itself -- for better and worse -- into an all-consuming, all-judged three-week sport. All you ever hear are coaches insisting that they're preparing their teams for March, validating in the minds of the players that November to February's end is just a long preseason. If March Madness has succeeded as the thrilling spectacle in sports, it has failed by robbing so much texture out of the season.

As much as anything, the regular season is college football's heart and soul. To construct a massive tournament that jeopardizes the importance of, say, a Florida State-Miami or Texas-Oklahoma meeting, it just isn't worth the money. This sport's biggest games should be played on crisp, autumn Saturdays in college towns across America. Threaten the gravity of those games, and, well, you threaten the core of the sport.

So, BCS officials flood the computers with ever-changing criteria, coaches delegate precious poll voting duties down to sports information directors, and out-of-town sportswriters take wild stabs on ballots for teams they've never seen play a complete game.

It doesn't have to be this way, and it sure doesn't have to be hard. There could be an educated committee of eyes watching everything across the season, a last line of defense to declare that the championship game is just that. College football doesn't need to lose the aura of the regular season and rivalries and bowl games that make this sport something to see. All it needs is the true No. 1 against the true No. 2, the championship of common sense.

Adrian Wojnarowski is a columnist for The Record (N.J.) and a regular contributor to ESPN.com. He can be reached at ESPNWOJ@aol.com.