If you've been following college football this week, you can be forgiven for concluding that the whole sport is teetering on the brink of apocalypse. Portents of doom are everywhere: hints of revolt, nuclear imagery, frogs dropping from the clouds.

The reason for all the sky-is-falling rhetoric, of course, is that if Tennessee loses to LSU in the SEC title game Saturday, then Nebraska likely will be tabbed by the BCS standings to face No. 1 Miami for the national championship in the Rose Bowl. And the prospect of the Cornhuskers, 26-point losers to Colorado in their regular-season finale, taking the back door to the title game has people apoplectic.

The estimable Ivan Maisel of Sports Illustrated, offers a fairly representative take when he writes: "I think it is our civic duty to all root for Tennessee this week, because if they lose, and the computers put Nebraska into the Rose Bowl instead of Oregon or Colorado, I predict college football's version of a nuclear winter."

There are just two things wrong with this dire outlook. Firstly, a nuclear winter could be just what the BCS and the present bowl system needs. Brigham Young, on the verge of going 13-0, can't even get a plate at the adults' table in the BCS party. In two weeks, the watered-down bowl season is going to begin with 5-6 North Texas meeting 6-5 Colorado State.

Secondly, the closer you examine the season-long performances of each of the pretenders to the title, the clearer it becomes: by the long-standing criteria that voters have used to rank college football teams, the BCS computers are right this time. In spite of all the provisional hysteria at the prospect, if Tennessee loses Saturday, Nebraska probably should get the nod.

Losing ugly

	If Tennessee loses, Nebraska and Eric Crouch should go to the Rose Bowl.

Look, I'm not claiming that Nebraska deserves a shot at the national championship, OK? Only that, whatever other murky qualities it has, the BCS formula is pretty clear on the point that there needs to be two teams playing in Pasadena. So if Tennessee loses, then writers and coaches have to do what they've always done, which is pick among the most deserving also-rans. And people have gotten so transfixed by that final score, they haven't considered any of the other salient factors, of which there are several.

Recall that two weeks ago, the No. 1 Huskers went to Boulder with some trepidation, knowing that they were due -- in fact, quite a bit overdue -- for a payback. The underachieving Buffaloes had, since 1992, conceived of all sorts of gruesome ways to lose to Nebraska, culminating recently with ever more ingenuous last-minute meltdowns that saw them victimized by missed chip-shot field goals, overtime heartbreakers and, most freakish of all, Nebraska's two-minute offense. In the previous five seasons, the five Nebraska wins came by a total of 15 points.

Colorado was stoked. In the pregame buildup, Buffalo players talked about the game defining their season and their college careers, and visualized the riot at the end if they knocked off the Big Red. Meanwhile, Nebraska was fretting the thin air, mumbling something about keeping its defense off the field by trying not to score so quickly. Trouble.

By the time the Huskers' defense looked out of its collective earhole to get the license plate on the Buffalo monster truck, the score was 35-3 early in the second quarter. At this point, Nebraska finally snapped out of its funk and started to play football again. They put Eric Crouch in a shotgun and used misdirection to get him to the outside. They brought a fifth man up to the line of scrimmage to stop Colorado's pancake-making offensive line. For the next quarter and a half, the Cornhuskers battled back, answering Colorado's 35-3 start with a gritty 27-7 run of their own. It would have been a 34-7 charge if Dahrran Diedrick hadn't fumbled near the goal line on NU's opening second-half drive.

After finally cutting the lead to 12, the Huskers' backs were broken when Bobby Pesavento came up with a clutch third-and-long scramble from deep in his own territory, on the way to a 93-yard touchdown drive. NU never stopped gambling and trying to get back into the game, and because of that, the score eventually got out of hand again. The Huskers went down hard, and they understandably dropped from No. 1 to No. 6 in the polls.

That's when the upsets became contagious. First Oklahoma lost, then a week later Florida and Texas both took gas, and when the BCS standings were released Monday, there was idle Nebraska sitting at No. 3, one spot ahead of Colorado, two spots ahead of Oregon, and one Tennessee loss away from a ticket to Pasadena. At this point, many of the people who cover college football for a living started having kittens. Colorado coach Gary Barnett is at the front of a long line of people who are asking the understandable question: How can a team that lost its last game by 26 points be playing for the national championship six weeks later?

Well, here's your answer: If the team enters the game unbeaten and ranked No. 1, if its first loss comes on the road, if it loses to a better team than any other school in the country with one loss, and if all the other one-loss schools ahead of the team choke in short order thereafter. That's how things work in the inexact world of college football rankings.

Surveying the field
But what about Colorado, the hottest team in the country, Big 12 Conference champions and owner of back-to-back big wins?

Mighty impressive, but let's not forget that the hottest team in the country has two losses, neither of them pretty. You thought Nebraska's loss was bad? Take a closer look at what Colorado did Oct. 20, when they went down to Texas and got pounded by the Longhorns, 41-7 (a larger margin than the one by which they later beat Nebraska).

Of course, if that were Colorado's only loss, the Buffaloes would deserve to be ranked ahead of Nebraska, since they'd whipped the Cornhuskers and later avenged Texas. But it wasn't. In addition to getting waxed by the Longhorns, CU also lost at home to Fresno State -- the same Fresno State team that was later vanquished by the likes of Boise State and Hawaii. That's two losses. A team with two losses has never won a national championship in college football. I didn't make the rules, but I know what they are: Lose once, you need help. Lose twice, you're out.

And for good reason. One of the great strengths of the sport is that it rewards excellence over the long haul. You can't base the entire season on one game, regardless of when it was played. And in this case you can't base the entire season on one quarter. Nebraska, after falling behind 35-3, got off the mat and outscored (and outplayed) Colorado the rest of the way. The statistics by the end of the game were more or less equal: Colorado had the edge in total offense, 582-552, and in first downs, 25-21. Compare that to the drubbing that Colorado took in Austin, on both the scoreboard and the stat sheet, when the Longhorns rolled up about 150 more yards of total offense, and lapped them in first downs, 25-12.

	RB Chris Brown is just one option in Colorado's explosive offense.

So the Buffaloes are to be feared and Gary Barnett is to be commended. But eight days does not a season make. Colorado could be in everyone's Top Five next August, but it doesn't belong in the Rose Bowl in January.

And, God bless the 50-foot Joey Harrington in Times Square, neither does Oregon. If Tennessee loses, there will be four one-loss teams still in the mix: Nebraska, Oregon, Illinois and Maryland. And of this group, Nebraska is not only the best team, it is by far the best team. Playing in the toughest conference in the country, NU was dominant, winning 11 straight games, each by at least 10 points, and knocking off Oklahoma when the defending national champions had the nation's longest winning streak and were No. 1 in the BCS standings. As losses go, Nebraska's is the most defensible, coming on the road against the No. 4 team in the BCS. Oregon's came at home to the No. 9 team, Stanford. The Ducks' dominated no one of consequence. Their big win came against Washington State; they played UCLA in the midst of its post-DeShaun free-fall and barely escaped with a one-point victory. Illinois and Maryland lost badly to Michigan and Florida State, respectively, teams that are no longer on the BCS radar. On a more objective level, all eight computer rankings used by the BCS place Nebraska ahead of Colorado and the other three teams.

So it's not pretty, and not much to be proud of. But, if Tennessee loses, the BCS formula and the coaches poll would be right: Nebraska is next in line because they've been more impressive than anyone else over the course of the season and, quite simply, it's would be their turn in the pecking order.

Tales of intrigue
And that's how it would probably play out. Unless, that is, all this media grumbling reaches critical mass, and the writers who vote in the Associated Press poll decide to use the BCS as their own personal chew-toy, then start playing Don King with the selection process.

There are whispers to this effect. BCS Kremlinoligist Jerry Palm brings up the possibility of writers dropping Nebraska a couple spots in their voting this week, just so the Cornhuskers would lose ground in the BCS formula. "Such a radical change in the polls involving teams not playing," writes Palm, "whether it is done to benefit Colorado or Oregon, would be unprecedented this late in the season and would call into question the whole integrity of the process." That's putting it mildly. If Tennessee loses, a much bigger travesty than Nebraska playing in the Rose Bowl would be the pollsters intentionally sabotaging the system so that Nebraska doesn't play in the Rose Bowl.

Look, if you dropped Nebraska to No. 9 after the Colorado loss, because you really thought it was that bad, then fine. But most writers dropped them to fifth or sixth. It would be intellectually dishonest for a voter who had NU 5th this week, to turn around now and drop them to 8th or 9th, just because he found out how the math works and wants to engage in a little social engineering.

Finally, and most importantly, manipulating the process would be self-defeating because it would only serve to place the scrutiny on the voters, let the BCS off the hook, and further delay the clearer-heads-prevail day of reckoning that college football desperately needs.

The BCS is, to put it kindly, a flawed system, the result of a cabal of power players in college football who are dedicated toward stopping a playoff system because it would, like the NCAA basketball tournament, distribute riches more evenly among the sport's haves and have-nots. These are the same people who, in the name of "saving" the bowl system have turned the glorious sports holiday of New Year's Day into a forgettable festival of also-rans, twelve hours of Big Ten No. 3 vs. SEC No. 4. These are the folks who snatched the postseason away from the NCAA and then allowed their most prized commodity, the national championship game, to become a 4½ hour corn-chip commercial.

While this year's BCS formula is marginally better than what the group has come up with in the past -- while it may in fact be the most equitable system yet devised to make an educated guess at the top two teams -- its strengths are beside the point. Because what gets obscured in all the "if Tennessee loses" speculation is that the BCS formula's central flaw still remains: It provides just two teams with a shot at the national championship. And prior to the bowls, there's almost always more than two teams that can make a legitimate claim to the title, or at least a shot at it.

There are 117 schools in Division I-A, playing 11 or 12 games a season. With wide variances in strength of schedule, and relatively few intersectional games, we reach the end of the regular season often having less of an idea about who the best team in the country is than we do in any other sport. We don't know really know how Oregon would match up with Miami, what Colorado's running game would do against Tennessee, or, for that matter, if anybody might actually be able to shut down BYU. So picking just two teams -- regardless of how carefully its done -- won't ever bring justice.

The answer
An NCAA-sanctioned, eight-team playoff is college football's best hope for redemption. In addition to crowning a true national champion, a playoff would at once earn the sport more money while eliminating the obnoxious on-field advertising. And wouldn't it be fun to call games by their proper names again? Orange Bowl, Sugar Bowl, Fiesta Bowl. A sensible plan could incorporate four major bowls on New Year's Day, with winners qualifying for a Football Final Four that would play off the following two weekends in January. Such a playoff, if it sent forward the six highest-rated conference champions along with two at-large teams determined by a selection committee, would level the playing field in a manner that the BCS, when it comes to giving at-large bids, clearly won't. An NCAA tournament selection committee would certainly give the gridiron Cinderellas -- Tulane in '98, Marshall in '99, Brigham Young in '01 -- a fairer hearing than the BCS ever has. (And no, a playoff wouldn't kill the smaller bowls, any more than the Big Dance killed the NIT. For one thing, ESPN still needs programming in late December.)

So, if Tennessee loses Saturday, send Nebraska to the Rose Bowl and let's bring on the nuclear winter. Because we need the firestorm, we need the debate and, ultimately, we need a playoff system. What we'll need in the meantime, though, is for the most deserving team available to be sent to Pasadena. And that team, according to the timeless, immutable laws of college football voting and the objective standards of eight computers, is Nebraska. Tire tracks and all.

Michael MacCambridge is the author of 'The Franchise: A History of Sports Illustrated Magazine' and the editor and contributing writer for 'ESPN SportsCentury. His upcoming book on the rise of pro football in modern America will be published by Random House in fall, 2003.