Evidence against BCS system keeps growing

College football's Bowl Championship Series is built on the assumption that the "automatic qualifying" or "AQ" conferences (ACC, Big 12, Big East, Big Ten, Pac-10, SEC) and Notre Dame are categorically better than all the others, like the Mountain West Conference.

It's why Notre Dame has had the same number of BCS Board votes as the 51 "non-AQ" schools combined. It's why Georgia Tech's Orange Bowl appearance will earn the ACC $18 million, but TCU's Fiesta Bowl berth will fetch the MWC only $9 million split with four other non-AQ conferences. And it's why one-loss Florida and Oklahoma teams got a shot at last year's BCS title game ahead of undefeated Utah.

Anyone watching college football this past year, though, saw plainly that there's no talent or quality-of-play disparity great enough to warrant such disparate postseason payouts and competitive opportunities. Utah kicked off 2009 by dominating SEC powerhouse Alabama. Non-AQ teams then scored convincing wins over California, Clemson, Oklahoma, Oregon, Oregon State and Virginia.

A growing body of evidence shows the BCS is a farce.

BCS apologists used to claim that non-AQ teams simply couldn't compete with college football's elite. Now, they're just evoking new pretexts to deny non-AQ teams their due. They discount non-AQ victories by repeatedly mentioning the weather conditions or the losers' injuries. They chalk-up losses to the AQ teams "not wanting to be there." This is my personal favorite — perhaps because it conjures childhood memories of my 7-year-old cousin shouting "I wasn't really trying" right after I whipped him in basketball or Nintendo or whatever.

That is obviously a silly excuse. If a team is unable to self-motivate and play consistently, that says something about the team's quality.

And if the BCS were correct about college football's quality-of-play gap, which is supposedly so enormous that it justifies giving six AQ conferences $430.6 million more than the five non-AQ conferences the last five postseasons, then it wouldn't matter that Alabama carried emotional bruises into last year's Sugar Bowl or that Oregon State somehow couldn't get psyched to play higher-ranked BYU team in Las Vegas. Alabama and Oregon State should've won those games in their sleep.

ESPN's Craig James presented another common argument last week during Utah's Poinsettia Bowl win over Cal, saying that the MWC didn't deserve AQ status because its bottom-dwellers were weak. Apparently, it's not enough for non-AQ champs to punk the AQs' best. The MWC's sub-.500 teams need to be better than other sub-.500 teams.

The goalposts keep moving.

Unfortunately, this is not just talk. It's a preview of what's to come.